In the past decade, as an increasingly sophisticated structural and functional component, glass has been widely used in flat panel displays, automobiles, buildings and other fields. This has driven glass manufacturers to improve their own characteristics of glass, develop better glass coatings, and improve glass cutting processes, specifically, to improve cutting accuracy, speed up cutting, reduce the impact on the environment, and reduce cutting costs.
For manufacturers with traditional cutting technology, arranging various edge grinding and cleaning links after processing will undoubtedly increase manufacturing hours and costs. These links may also have a negative impact on the environment, including the generation of debris that is not easy to handle, or the use of large amounts of water resources for cleaning. In addition, there is a growing demand for curved edges (especially FPDs for portable devices), while the glass mechanical cutting method does not support curved edges.
In view of today's glass use trend, these limitations are particularly severe. Specifically, the current market development trends include: higher precision of manufactured parts, sometimes very complex shapes and notches of parts, the use of ultra-thin (less than 1mm) substrates, and the emergence of chemically strengthened glass.
With the increasing demand of the manufacturing and processing industry, glass laser cutting came out. Its appearance broke the situation that the traditional cutting and processing industry could not complete the precision processing. With the advantages of glass laser cutting, the current severe limitations have been broken. So why choose a glass laser cutting machine?
First of all, the laser cutting method adopts non-contact processing technology, which greatly avoids the problems of fine cracks and debris. Secondly, the residual stress left in the glass by laser cutting is small (different cutting methods have different residual stresses), so the strength of the cutting edge is higher. This is very important. If the residual stress is too large, even if the force is applied at the center of the glass plate, the glass edge will often crack. Therefore, compared with the glass cut by mechanical method, the glass cut by laser can withstand 1-2 times more force.
Since there is little (or no) need for subsequent cleaning or grinding, laser cutting also reduces the number of process links. Therefore, although the investment cost of laser cutting workbench is higher than that of mechanical system, the total investment of laser cutting is lower than that of mechanical processing system because no additional grinder is required. In addition, the demand for post-treatment and cleaning work is reduced, and the laser cutting method is more environmentally friendly than the mechanical method, and consumes less water resources (or does not need to consume water resources at all).
Some laser cutting methods support glass curve cutting. Nowadays, the demand for curve cutting is growing. Especially in the mobile phone manufacturing industry, manufacturers hope to produce screens with more complex geometric shapes, including punching holes in materials to accommodate keys, control keys, LEDs and camera lenses.
When the traditional cutting process cannot provide the required cutting quality or characteristics, or the old method becomes too expensive due to the need for a lot of post-processing, the laser has a good advantage. However, glass laser cutting covers a wide range of different technologies, and each technology has its unique characteristics and advantages. This is why we choose the glass laser cutting machine.