- Irépa Laser

Cleaning and surface preparation

The conventional processes of cleaning, stripping or surface preparation often require the use of aggressive materials (solvent or abrasive) that damages the support or the environment. Laser is the solution to avoid the problems of damaging effects and pollution and it gives a better precision in the different fields of applications linked to surface preparation.

Principle :

This process enables to eliminate totally or partially surface layers covering different materials without altering the substrate by concentrating the beam generated by a pulsed laser, most of the time in Q-switched mode. The given pulse is very short (from a few tenths to a few hundreds of nanoseconds) and provides very high peak powers of about 107 to 108 W. This produces a photomechanical reaction but thermal effects are limited because the average power of these lasers is low (10 to 20 W for Nd-YAG lasers). The superficial polluting layer is transformed into fine particles of dust or fog without altering the surface.

Laser cleaning on an opaque substrate

Laser cleaning on a transparent substrate

These particles are then easily caught through an extractor and eventually filtered. The laser can be used either in direct shot or through an optical cable in a robot arm. This kind of transport makes the process very flexible and gives a remarkable fine work either in manual mode or in automatized mode for robotized systems.