Civan’s OPA 6 Weld dynamic beam laser wins Prism Award

Israel-based Civan has received the 2022 Prism Award in the industrial lasers category from SPIE, the international society for optics and photonics, and Photonics Media. The award recognizes Civan’s OPA 6 Weld, a 7- to 14-kW, single-mode, continuous-wave, dynamic beam laser that modulates beam shape as desired at speeds up to hundreds of megahertz without any moving parts.

This entirely new category of lasers uses optical phased-array coherent beam-combining to merge many single-mode laser beams into a larger beam. Each laser’s light overlaps with other beams in the far field, creating a diffraction pattern that allows manipulation of the beam shape in real time. Phase modulators control the individual beams, and the resulting interference pattern can be adjusted to maximize the beam spot position and produce various shape patterns inscribed by the beam’s motion.

Shape frequency, shape sequence, and depth of focus also can be controlled to allow for optimization of evaporation in the capillary, flow in the molten pool, and solidification of the melt for any laser materials processing application. Such control eliminates pore, spatter, and crack formation while increasing feed rates and speeds in welding and additive manufacturing applications, the company reports.