In this episode of Manufacturing Matters, Fel Legrand, US/Canada Sales Manager at Gentec-EO joined Jimmy Carroll and John Lewis at SPIE Photonics West 2024 to talk about the latest developments and trends in laser beam diagnostics and performance devices. Topics included the importance of accurate laser beam measurement, including solutions for extremely high-power lasers and the applications in which these products are deployed, along with nuclear fusion, telecommunication, additive manufacturing, and more.

Jimmy Carroll: [00:00:07] Hi everybody. My name is Jimmy Carroll. I’m the vice president of operations at Tech B2B Marketing, and I’m here at SPIE Photonics West 2024. I have the pleasure of being joined by Fel Legrand and John Lewis, my colleague. Fel works for Gentec EO. For those who don’t know about Gentec EO, Fel, would you mind giving us a little bit of a background and let us know a bit about what you guys are excited about here at the show today?

Fel Legrand: [00:00:29] Sure. Thank you for having us. So first, Gentec EO, we’re a manufacturer of laser beam diagnostics and performance devices. We allow our customers to measure laser beam power, beam energy, and beam profile, as well as terahertz sources power measurements. So it’s diagnostics tools integrated in machines, in production facilities, in labs to measure laser beam performance.

Jimmy Carroll: [00:00:54] So for people out there who don’t know why you would measure laser power, let’s say, and count me among them, because it’s a bit new to me, on this side, what’s the reason for that?

Fel Legrand: [00:01:07] So one great example that I like to present: eye surgery, for example. You want to be sure the laser pulse energies are calibrated to the right amount of energy to just process the cataract or other things you need to do properly. Not too less, not too much laser power energy. So you need to calibrate the device. Same for a production facility running a welding or cutting application or additive manufacturing. You want to be sure that your layer-by-layer build using fiber laser  at 1064 nanometer and so on, going to the layers of copper, aluminum, and so on, is targeting the right melting temperature. So they need to measure, and above that, even better, they need to measure light during process using an optical pickup sometimes to be sure, okay, I have my 2.5  kilowatt of laser power going to this sample and I can adjust this. Oh this is dropping a little bit. I need to adjust it to make it be bigger and so on for the process.

Jimmy Carroll: [00:02:00] So not to simplify this, would you say that folks out there who may have received LASIK surgery, they may have Gentec EO to thank for their eyes not melting?

Fel Legrand: [00:02:13] Definitely, and how it works is either during the process or not necessarily during the eye surgery, they measure the laser beam pulse energies before and after. You have some maintenance routine check, you do that every day, every week, every month. And they use a suite of detectors. And among them there are altimeters. famous.

John Lewis: [00:02:35] And I’d like you to elaborate more on the terahertz source measurement and analysis. What is a terahertz source?

[00:02:41] So a terahertz source is this place in the electromagnetic spectrum between radio waves and basically infrared light. So this is more and more sought after for applications for non-ionizing, beams, basically for airport security, for example. By trying to get a way to see any hidden objects and things. So using this non-ionizing radiation to probe objects, to see if there are any defects inside. There’s a lot of manufacturing defects in products online. Shooting terahertz radiation at plastic parts and so on to see about any defects inside and so on. And we don’t make those sources, as usual. We make tools to measure the power in watts with pulse energy in joules or those flashes.

John Lewis: [00:03:28] Can you talk a little bit about why it’s important for manufacturers to use these measurement analysis tools.

Fel Legrand: [00:03:38] Sure. Many things could happen. Let’s say you have degradation over time in optical components: fiber optics delivery and lenses and collimators and so on. Everything that would degrade over time. So after a couple of weeks, months, years, and so on, you could see your beam shape change, your focal spot move along the propagation axis, and just the power level decreasing over time. So if you integrate proper measurement devices, communicating with your interfacing and your control tools, the facility, you’ll see the drop in power. My laser is not performing as expected today. So I need to maybe replace something. You could run some analysis with all the data you get with machine learning has a bright future  You could run a lot of testing and measurement. As well for alignment, we see a lot of customers using remotely controlled tools like beam profilers to see about the alignment of beams inside a millimeter. Inside a set of lenses and so on. And they adjust where the beam is going live by using these tools.

Jimmy Carroll: [00:04:44] One question I want to ask. And correct me if I’m wrong. Like I said, full honesty, disclosure here is my background is more on the industrial automation side. So some of these questions may seem silly, but I’ll venture to guess that the use of lasers is important in an area like EV battery manufacturing. And that’s a space that is kind of an upcoming and maybe not emerging but increasingly important application for the machine vision folks. Is it also for the laser side, and if so, where does your product come into play?

Fel Legrand: [00:05:17] Yeah. Great question. First, battery welding is strong. Copper  welding, for example, using blue light or  1064 nanometer light, that’s a strong application case and use case. And our customers, they ask themselves usually two questions: How am I going to get the most accurate measurement of my laser power? Again, before commissioning a new laser, I need to set the right parameters, okay, to weld copper at this speed, I need this kind of power level. So I want to be sure the laser that I’m buying is providing me this 600 watts I need, some control checks, and quality controls. So how do they make the proper calibrated measurement? And I like to remind: the accuracy as we offer it – “Partners for accuracy” is our motto – is a combination of two things. First of all, the measurement ability, how close two consecutive measurements are from one another, and the calibration certainty : how close the reading in watts, joules are to the true definition of the watt, joule on  the National Institute of Standards and Technology, these standards that we use to calibrate our devices. So first we want to make a proper, accurate measurement. Then they want the detectors to work from them. Customers connected  or serial commands, serial communication, internet, wireless, and everything using dot net  environment, a internet as it between strips right now  or LabVIEW  or anything. And they want to gather as much data as possible and to predict what’s going to happen. Okay, when I see this trend in my laser power going up or down for whatever reason, usually it tells me this is because I need to change this component, so I can act as a preventive Mappiness  should be.

John Lewis: [00:06:56] Are you seeing any notable trends in terms of customer requests in certain industries?

Fel Legrand: [00:07:02] Sure, faster, higher power, and smaller beams. Yeah, yeah, it’s part of the release of, for example, the 50 kilowatt gold cone detector that we’re releasing at Photonics West this year. It’s to increase the capacity as far as total average power. So burning stations for fiber lasers. So measuring for long-term one-time duration, quality-control measures or some directed energy applications is a huge amount of power, and they want to use small beams. So we come up with this gold cone design that train  small beams, high power, faster response. We came up with an integrating sphere sensor. So up to one kilowatt for now, water-cooled with a photodiode inside of it. So benefiting from the rise time  of photodiode, we’re talking 200 milliseconds, very fast rise times up to 1 kilowatt possible. So fast measurements, accurate to NIST standards, high dema  thresholds, same thing. So high power density, high energy density, and so on. And the versatility as far as controls, again, serial command or anything it could just interface with the New York  control suite and the monitoring solutions.

John Lewis: [00:08:12] You talked about the 50 kilowatt high-power laser beams. Can you talk a little bit about some of the applications that those beams are used in?

Fel Legrand: [00:08:19] Yeah. Faster laser cutting, for example. More power, the faster you cut for metal sheet cutting. Welding  is one example. And if you go to the cost side of it, one fascinating application of those days is nuclear fusion and inertial confinement developments  for a national munitions facility are using our probes to lock  safely and measure the energy of the signal pulses descend those targets to trigger nuclear fusion. So the trend is to go higher energy, shorter pulse width, for example, higher power. So detectors are more robust to block those beams safely, not own  and make a proper measurement of it in joules.

John Lewis: [00:08:57] And how about applications for the up to 1 kilowatt release?

Fel Legrand: [00:09:01] Typically additive manufacturing is in this range, so layer by layer. And we see providers of additive manufacturing machines either setting the proper parameters for a given build. Okay, I need this power level 500 watts, this scanning speed and this beam size and here. I need my DM squared to be, which is the beam quality factor or power meter. I need DM squared to be in this range and so on. So you could just define the proper recipe for a given build. And we’re talking making rocket nozzles or medical parts, with the crazy shapes inside, with vacuum parts and so on, which is not at all to make that be a commercial manufacturing layer-by-layer approach. Either that or they go live using optical pickups or just a fraction of the laser power going to a photodiode or a sensor to measure the beam, have power life and adjust it depending on how the build is going. Heat loads and repetition heat fluxes and so on. Oh, I need less heat here, but there would be too much for the powder to melt and so on and can adjust it a bit it this way. So additive manufacturing is a great example of 1 kilowatt range.

Jimmy Carroll: [00:10:11] So what else are you guys excited about? Not just for your company but let’s say the general photonics space. What are you guys most excited about?

Fel Legrand: [00:10:21] Nuclear fusion is really exciting. If we’re talking carbon-free energy triggered by lasers, of courses that will make our day. Telecommunication as well. Free space telecommunication, talking satellites exchanging data using laser beams, which is encoded or not sure if it’s the phase or the amplitude or the repetition rate that’s modulated, but the low-Earth-orbit satellites are using lasers to communicate. So we’re seeing this trend measuring more and more lasers  here. And medical devices are going strong. Eye surgery is a great example, something someone could really rely on.

Jimmy Carroll: [00:11:02] As soon as you said the eye surgery. What’s the importance of measuring laser power? And you said eye surgery. And I said, okay, I understand.

John Lewis: [00:11:12] Yeah. One more question. I noticed you also recently introduced a 195 millimeter detector or Y laser beam. So I’m wondering, can you talk a little bit about what led to that development and what kinds of applications these wide laser beams are used in?

Fel Legrand: [00:11:29] Definitely. So we’re talking a large hydroelectric sensor measuring pulse energies in joules. So not to measure average power in watts but for pulsed lasers. It’s typically driven by research labs and high peak power facilities. Nuclear fusion is an example. Because the trend here if we’re talking this field, which is very exciting, and by the way, we’re starting to see maybe some crossovers between industrialism and factories and capacity. They have to enclose the system and make it industry-ready. And those more research labs for nuclear fusion are trying to speed up the repetition rates. Because if they go one shot per day, that’s not enough. If you want to build a power plant around that, you need at least 10 Hz. So high peak power, high-energy pulses with a good repetition rate. So that’s why we come up with this design. It takes up to 200 Hz, 700 joules per shot. So it takes a huge amount of peak power. And to still have a reliable way to measure the pulse energies. So a robust, calibrated way to measure the peak power or the energy per pulse and provide the tools to be sure they develop the right lasers and the right system for those applications here. So nuclear fusion development is the right example for all this detecting.

Jimmy Carroll: [00:12:46] So if people want to learn more, it’s gentec-eo.com, is that right? Or the LinkedIn page.

Fel Legrand: [00:12:51] Yeah, with a resource to online articles and the product finder. Because sometimes we spend a lot of time talking about specs and so on. Customers like to spend our time answering them, disrespect  themselves in our product finder and get preselection of products and then having discussions with them.

Jimmy Carroll: [00:13:10] Well, John, if you don’t have any more questions, I, want to thank you for your time, Fel, I really appreciate it. I know it must be a very busy show for you, so, it’s valuable, valuable time that you shared with us, and we appreciate it. If anybody has any questions for Fel or Gentec EO, they can reach out to us. We’ll be happy to pass them along if you don’t go to the website. You can reach us at Manufacturing-Matters.com. And thanks so much for either watching or listening.