Laser cleaning is an eco-friendly process used to remove rust, paint, oxide and other contaminants from metal surfaces. Because of its efficiency, it is being used in an increasing number of applications.
Rust removal can be time and labor consuming. Oxide removal may involve hazardous chemicals specific to each material that needs to be removed. In some cases, paint removal by sandblasting can damage the metal underneath.
Dealing with these problems usually comes at a significant cost, but laser cleaning is changing this: it is a cost-effective solution that reduces cleaning times and maintenance.
If you are skeptical about these claims regarding laser technology, keep reading for the key facts about what a laser does when removing contaminants and coatings.
All Materials Have an Ablation Threshold
Laser ablation occurs when a material layer or a coating is removed with a laser beam. This is the process behind all laser cleaning applications. Take laser rust removal on steel. When the beam hits the surface, molecular bonds in the dust or rust layer are broken and ejected from the substrate. In less technical terms, you can imagine that the layer to be removed is simply vaporized by the laser beam.
Laser Ablation
A simple way to grasp the importance of the ablation threshold is to compare it to throwing a ball over a wall. If you don't throw it high enough, it will never make it over to the other side. Even if you throw the ball a thousand times, you will always fail. The same applies to laser derusting. You can shoot the laser beam a thousand times but as long as the energy is below the ablation threshold of the material you’re working with, nothing will ever be removed.
Now, every material has different properties and thus different molecular bonds. In other words, each material has a specific ablation threshold. To successfully remove a layer from a given material, the energy transferred by the laser beam must be above the ablation threshold of that particular material.
It is Consumable-Free and Environmentally Friendly
As this cleaning method only uses a laser beam to vaporize the layer to be removed, there are literally no consumables with it. This is the beauty of lasers, which only need a power plug to be set and ready to go.
On top of this, lasers use no chemical products or solvents. This makes laser surface cleaning one of the safest solutions when it comes to rust and coating removal.
5. Laser Cleaning is of Interest for Various Applications
At the moment, the most common laser cleaning applications include:
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Welding pre-treatments to remove rust and other contaminants from welding areas
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Welding post-treatments to remove aluminum and stainless-steel oxides
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Laser surface preparation to maximize paint adhesion
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Laser oxide removal from specialty alloy ingots
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Depainting parts that would otherwise be scrapped due to paint defects
