Philips Photonics team wins laser innovation award
Armand Pruijmboom, general manager of Philips GmbH Photonics Aachen, has been awarded the Innovation Award Laser Technology 2016, a European prize initiated by the associations Arbeitskreis Lasertechnik and the European Laser Institute ELI and provided with €10 000 prize money.
This award is for applied research and can be conferred on an individual researcher or on an entire project group.The scientific and technological projects in question must centre on the use of laser light in materials processing or the methods of producing such light, and must furthermore be of demonstrable commercial value to industry.
Pruijmboom and his team won first place with the innovation, VCSEL arrays: A novel high-power laser technology for "˜digital thermal processing'. The jury composed by ten international experts selected three outstanding finalists among 15 submitted applications.
The innovative work of the Philips team consists in the development of the VCSEL array chips dedicated for high power application, the packaging and thermal management of the VCSEL arrays including comprehensive finite-element modeling, the system design by tailoring packages of various "˜standard building blocks' to specific industrial applications and finally the application development itself.
The VCSEL array design offers an innovative solution for heating large areas with high throughput in industrial manufacturing. Conventionally such equipment uses gas burners, hot air blowers and electrically or halogen lamp heated belt ovens. But these heating methods can only be switched on and off slowly and are inaccurate (they cannot easily deposit heat only where it is needed or impose sophisticated spatial thermal profiles on a work piece).
VCSELs offer a solution for heating large areas heating only when and where it is needed in a short time with cost effective, compact and robust systems. Compared to conventional non-laser based heating technologies, VCSEL arrays offer flexibility, high efficiency and lifetime. As a solid state technology VCSEL's fuel the trend to fully digitised manufacturing flows.
