Fiber Laser Learning Lab 11 We are no longer Flying Blind @SarbarMultimedia

Uploaded March 2020 | Updated September 2026, 1 week ago

Lotus Laser (lotuslaser.com) have lent me this MOPA 20 watt fiber laser to “play with”. Although I have a moderate understanding of laser technology and how constant power glass tube systems work, pulsing fibre laser marking machines are shrouded in deeper mystery than the glass tube machines. They have been designed for high speed marking and the technology has been well tried and proven. There are limited “tricks” that the pulsing laser technology can perform. You enter predefined parameters for each marking “trick” you wish the machine to deliver , then stand back in amazement. Most correspondents tell me they have bought their machine direct from China and received a machine and EzeCAD software, preloaded with a few default parameters. No other instructions beyond the EzeCAD manual are forthcoming.
I must stress I am neither a teacher or expert in this field so you join me in my learning adventure with the warning that I have a simple but inquisitive mind and will probably make mistakes on my way to discovering the truth. I WILL oversimplify and maybe distort the scientific detail in my quest to build a simple picture of why and how this technology works. I am not trying to reverse engineer anything , just to break through the seemingly impenetrable “techno cotton wool” that surrounds this amazing piece of science.

Fiber Laser Learning Lab 11 We are no longer Flying Blind

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$RDWorks Learning Lab 210 Lets Focus on Focus AGAIN The dictionary describes a focal point as that place where parallel rays of light passing through a lens are refracted to converge on a single point. That may apply to visible light for cameras and telescopes where light sources are uniform and lenses are high precision and usually multiples, but in the world of Chinese lasers things are a long way from that dictionary definition. The use of a single lens and then a choice of just two forms, plano convex and meniscus, is the first disadvantage. The simple spherical geometry of these lens forms will never achieve that dictionary perfection. The longer the focal length of the lens, the greater the imperfection. The single feature that ALL lasers beams posses is a non-uniform intensity profile. The perfect laser beam will conform to a Gaussian intensity distribution. ( a bell shape graph) where the central light intensity is many times greater than the outer regions of the beam. Combine the focussing weakness of spherical lens geometry with the non uniform intensity within the laser beam and we no longer have that idealized model of focus that we are all taught. We set the focal point for a lens to that distance where we create the smallest burn spot or the thinnest drawn line. This is not setting the LIGHT focal point but that point where the the light INTENSITY is sufficient to damage the material we are marking/cutting . I clearly demonstrate that the traditional model of focus is of very limited value in our weird world of lasers.$