Industrial grade fibre delivery system for pulsed lasers

Short-pulse emitting laser sources are finding an increasing number of applications in industrial material processing; among these, especially relevant will be their use in the subtractive processes that are expected to complement the laser based additive manufacturing (AM) in the next generation machines [1]. Since solid-core silica fibres used for CW beams are not suitable for transporting high peak power pulses, so far their delivery has been mainly through free-space systems, an approach that poses many limitations to AM machine designers. Very recently, however, innovative fibre based delivery solutions that exploit new types of hollow core photonic crystal fibre (HC-PCF) have been reported [2]; particularly promising is the use of Kagome HC-PCF for they capability of withstanding very high peak power, although they also require very precise beam alignment and particular care in deploying the fibre for their mode sensitivity and thus beam quality to perturbations [3].