Orlando, FL – October 31, 2023 – The Laser Institute (LIA) is thrilled to announce the recipient of the prestigious Arthur L. Schawlow Award for 2023. This year, the award goes to the esteemed Dr.-Ing. E. h. Peter Leibinger for his outstanding contributions in laser technology, his commercial success, and his accomplishments as an industry leader.
Started in 1982, the Arthur L. Schawlow Award is one of LIA’s highest honors, named after the esteemed physicist and laser pioneer, Dr. Arthur Schawlow. This award is presented annually to individuals who have demonstrated exceptional leadership, innovation, and impact within the realms of science and technology.
Dr.-Ing. E. h. Peter Leibinger is widely recognized as a trailblazer and has held several positions as managing director at various TRUMPF companies. He was Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of TRUMPF SE + Co. KG and has been the TRUMPF Supervisory Board Chairman since July. In 2020, Dr. Leibinger was also appointed as co-chair of an expert council to advise the German federal government on the development of quantum computers. These are just some of the remarkable achievements that show his commitment to innovation and how he has become a true leader of industry.
LIA’s Executive Director, Gilbert Haas said, “Peter Leibinger has advanced laser technology for decades. His innovative leadership, ardent support, and advocacy of lasers in science, politics and society contribute to the advancement of laser technology and applications worldwide.”
The award ceremony honoring Dr.-Ing. E. h. Peter Leibinger took place on Wednesday, October 18 at The Palmer House Hilton in Chicago, IL. During the ceremony, Dr. Leibinger delivered his address entitled “The Laser-TRUMPF Synergy”.
LIA extends its warmest congratulations to Dr.-Ing. E. h. Peter Leibinger on this well-deserved recognition.
About LIA:
The Laser Institute of America (LIA) is the professional society for laser applications and safety serving the industrial, educational, medical, research and government communities throughout the world since 1968.
The Laser Institute, a nonprofit organization that promotes laser safety and education, announced that Dr. Nathaniel Quick has retired from his Executive Director position, effective February 28, 2023. LIA’s President Henrikki Pantsar says, “The organization has been managed by Executive Director Dr. Nat Quick for the past five years, and it is due to his leadership and the tireless work of the LIA Staff that we are in this position to look for further growth. Therefore, it is with sadness that I announce the retirement of Nat from his position as the Executive Director. But it is also my pleasure to announce Nat’s retirement, as we know that it will allow him to enjoy other aspects of his life, enjoy time with his family and relax after spending a majority of his life in management and executive positions, as an entrepreneur, and most recently guiding our Laser Institute of America.”
Dr. Quick has been an integral part of LIA, bringing his expertise and vision to help the organization grow and achieve success. “We are extremely grateful for Nat’s service to the LIA and to his leadership filled with hard work, passion and integrity,” says Henrikki Pantsar.
While announcing his retirement, Dr. Quick had this to say, “I will miss being a part of the day-to-day operations of LIA and its staff, but look forward to providing support and advice when and where needed. It has been an honor and privilege to serve. I will forever be grateful for my time at LIA and the memories I have made there. Thank you to all who have supported me along this journey.”
The LIA would like to thank Dr. Quick for his hard work, dedication, and commitment to the organization and wishes him all the best in his retirement.
LIA has begun the search for a new executive director and is committed to finding the best candidate to lead the organization into its next chapter. If you know someone who would be interested in the position, the posting can be found at www.lia.org/ed-application
Liège, 7/10/2019 – LASEA, one of the world leaders in laser micromachining, has announced it is tripling its equity and entering a new growth phase in its various markets. The current shareholders (Epimède, SRIW, Noshaq and private shareholders) are backing this operation to the tune of 6.1 million euros (first phase) to which will be added almost 10 million euros thanks to additional support from Europe and the Walloon Region.
LASEA, the high-tech Liège company, a laser micromachining pioneer
With annual organic growth of 32% since 2012, in 7 years, LASEA has multiplied its revenue and its
workforce by 7. Now the European leader of femtosecond laser micromachining, it is rapidly
increasing its market shares in the USA and Japan.
LASEA machines are used for cutting, marking and texturing materials with unrivalled quality and
precision (up to 0.2μm, i.e. 250x smaller than the width of a human hair). With cutting-edge R&D at
the international level, it regularly initiates innovations well in advance of the state of the art (cutting
with no conicity, bio-mimicry, machining along 7 axes simultaneously, etc.).
The capital increase will bolster its growth of recent years in both its primary sectors (pharmaceutical
industry, luxury, medical devices) and in new sectors like electronics.
New resources to accelerate its growth further and develop new sectors
LASEA S.A. l Liège Science Park l Rue des Chasseurs Ardennais 10 l 4031 Angleur l BELGIQUE 2 / 3
“With this capital-raising operation, the biggest since LASEA was founded, we are giving ourselves the
means to match our ambitions. Our strategy is to further strengthen our commercial presence in our
various countries while pursuing our cutting-edge technological developments in laser micromachining.
To achieve our goals, we are going to extend our campaigns to recruit new talent and to seek synergies
with other companies in our market niches”, Axl Kupisiewicz, Lasea CEO stated.
To support this new development phase, a new building in the Liège Science Park will come on-stream in
June 2020. The 4,000 m² of office and production space (workshops and clean rooms) will allow the
current production capacity to be multiplied by three. This investment is covered by a loan of 7 million
euros from BNP Paribas Fortis and Belfius.
Benoît Fellin, Investment Manager at the Noshaq Group: “We have backed LASEA in all its development
stages, since it was founded in 1999. Today, and starting at Liège, LASEA is acknowledged internationally
for its very specific expertise. We are therefore very enthusiastic about taking part in this operation.
These new resources will allow LASEA to continue to grow.”
Pierre Paraire, responsible for handling the matter at SRIW: “The entrepreneurial ability of the founder,
an innovation strategy translated into a product strategy, international deployment, the level of
qualification of human resources, etc. All these factors have led SRIW to reaffirming its shareholder’s
support for LASEA by taking part in this new capital-raising operation”
Philippe Degeer, Investment Manager at Epimède: “We are delighted once again to have established a
partnership with LASEA and other key investment funds to support this ambitious growth project. Our
goal is to help the company grow and enable it to reach a higher level. We have full confidence in the
ability of the LASEA team to offer exceptional performance in the future and are delighted to be part of
this project.”
The equity capital-raising operation will allow the company to initiate a new development phase, to
accelerate sales and to continue a process of industrializing new products stemming from its major
research programs.
These new resources will be used to:
Expand the sales and marketing force
Develop the subsidiaries (Bordeaux – France; Biel – Switzerland; San Diego – USA), as well as the
new agents’ and distributors’ network (Japan, Australia, United Kingdom, Netherlands, Spain,
Germany, Taiwan, etc.).
Hire new talent to finalise the new products targeted at the medical and electronics sectors
Strengthen synergies with companies in its market niches
Promote 2 new softwares worldwide (deployment in January 2020)
About LASEA:
Founded in 1999, LASEA supplies production lines to the most prestigious companies in the world
including the top 3 Swiss watchmakers, leading glasses manufacturers, the pharmaceutical and medical
industry (intra-ocular and cochlear implants), as well as several big names of Silicon Valley. Active in 27
countries and on 4 continents, it has already installed more than 300 machines worldwide (production
systems and lines operating 24 hours a day). In addition to its headquarters in Belgium (Liège Science
Park), it has subsidiaries in Bordeaux, San Diego and Biel. It employs 80 people and owns a 25% stake in
CISEO (formerly WOW group) with CITIUS and UNISENSOR.
LASEA has been a finalist in the competition of the Promising Enterprise of the Year (EY), is part of the
50 fastest-growing companies in Belgium (Fast 50 – Deloitte) and has won various awards including the
Wallonia Export Grand Prix 2018 (AWEX) and the Micron d’Or 2018 (Machine-tools
category). www.lasea.com
About Noshaq:
Noshaq is the financial partner of reference for the creation and development of SMEs in the Liège
region. Over the years, Noshaq has developed a panel of funding vehicles in line with market needs and
trends and with its strategy. www.noshaq.be
About SRIW:
S.R.I.W. develops a wide range of customised solutions to support business creation, development
through innovation or investment, internal and external growth, the creation of subsidiaries in Wallonia,
Belgium or abroad, winning new markets, etc. The value of its shareholdings currently exceeds 2.2 billion
euros. www.sriw.be
About Epimède:
Epimède Capital is an investment fund targeting small and medium-sized enterprises with high growth
potential in the technology sector. www.epimede.com
ORLANDO, Fla., March 11, 2019 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ — The Laser Institute (LIA) will recognize Jamie J. King, Certified Laser Safety Officer (CLSO) for Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, with the R. James Rockwell, Jr. Educational Achievement Award at the International Laser Safety Conference (ILSC).
Awarded biennially since 2005, the R. James Rockwell, Jr. Educational Achievement Award honors individuals with outstanding contributions to laser safety education through: training and education courses, publications, software development, significant involvement in safety-related conferences, educational website development, and more.
By Achim Mahrle1,2, Madlen Borkmann 2,1, Eckhard Beyer1,2, Michael Hustedt3, Christian Hennigs3, Alexander Brodeßer3, Jürgen Walter3, Stefan Kaierle3
1 Fraunhofer IWS Dresden, Germany
2 TU Dresden, Germany
3 Laser Zentrum Hannover e.V. (LZH), Germany
Developers and users of industrial remote laser beam welding applications are often faced with different challenges under the conditions of series production. First, those applications are preferably conducted without any localized gas shielding, and therefore, specific interactions between the laser radiation and the welding fumes are very likely to occur, causing an impairment of the process stability, the reliability and the weld seam quality. Second, welding fume residuals are capable of contaminating workpieces, optical components and other parts of the processing chamber, and they are also able to cause a serious pollution of the cabin atmosphere, because a significant part of the welding fume species is harmful or even toxic and carcinogenic. Each of these points gives a good reason to develop appropriate cabin air flow concepts, but in practice, it is still a challenge to design and optimize the air or gas flow because (i) the conditions of an ideal gas flow regime are uncertain, (ii) different gas flows are able to interact in complex manners, and (iii) it is costly to describe and monitor the gas flow characteristics inside the processing chamber experimentally. Consequently, a complementary combination of experimental and theoretical work has been performed to improve the understanding of inherent issues and relationships.
The experimental work was focused on the characterization of process phenomena and the determination of reliable welding conditions. For that purpose, a particular processing chamber was designed as shown in Figure 01. The interior view of this chamber shows inlet nozzles from a flat-jet type at different positions (1-3) on the right-hand side, as well as a global and a local exhaust air funnel (4-5) on the left-hand side. An additional cross-jet was applied to protect the laser optics (6). In this processing chamber, welding trials with a multi-mode fiber laser at an applied laser power of 3 kW and a welding speed of 2 m/min were performed on mild steel sheets with a thickness of 10 mm. Welds generated without any air flow showed no clear indications of a deep penetration process, and the weld depth was rather low. In contrast, the penetration was more than doubled under the influence of a well-defined gas flow. These findings emphasize the importance of an adapted cabin air flow with respect to the process efficiency. In the case of the investigations performed, local gas flow velocities in the range of 1 – 2 m/s above the weld zone were found to be sufficient to achieve this effect, and it was proven that larger values do not increase the penetration depth further on. In addition, it was found that a particular height of the welding plume is acceptable for stable welding regimes with maximum weld penetration depth. These processing conditions have been considered as a basis for optimization efforts regarding the cabin air flow.
However, with respect to the whole cabin flow, simple rules for an appropriate design are hardly available and optimal parameter configurations are difficult to find by means of empirical approaches because of the high number of control factors and factor combinations. To give an example, the individual air flow out of the applied flat-jet nozzle type is determined by 4 factors, namely the flow rate, the nozzle inclination, the distance to the processing zone and the outflow aperture. For the whole cabin air flow, 19 factors of influence have to be taken into account in total, which means that 219, i.e. more than a half million, factor-level combinations are possible if each factor is tested at only two value levels. Obviously, there is no alternative to Design-of-Experiments (DoE) methods which provide so-called screening designs to identify the most vital factors from a group of 19 factors with a minimal number of 192 runs. Such an analysis was performed by means of a Computational-Fluid-Dynamics (CFD) model to derive detailed information on cause-effect relationships regarding the cabin air flow. Exemplarily, Figure 02 (left) shows a computed air flow field for a particular parameter constellation. Process emissions were modeled as metal vapor inflow rate, and the height of a particular vapor concentration isoline was used as model response for the cabin flow evaluation. As a result of the screening analysis, 6 factors out of 19 were found as the most vital ones. With such a reduced number of factors, it became possible to apply a so-called multi-level Response-Surface-Method (RSM) as a basis for an air flow optimization. With a numerical effort of 157 additional computation runs, the functional dependencies between control factors and outcomes were quantified and described by a cubic regression model. Such a regression model is numerically easy to use and can be applied efficiently to determine optimal parameter configurations by computing the desirability function, plotted in Figure 02 (right) as a measure of the degree of fulfillment of defined optimization criteria, i.e. the limitation of the welding plume height to an acceptable level with minimal overall air or gas consumption.
The study has demonstrated a methodology to optimize the complex cabin air flow under the conditions of remote laser beam welding. However, the specific results cannot be generalized in a simple way as adaptable rules for the design of industrial processing cabins, because the characteristics of particular chambers, the spatial and temporal processing conditions, the type of applied air-flow components and the peculiarities of the specific welding applications always have to be taken into account for a profound analysis.
Acknowledgements
The work was performed in close collaboration by the Laser Zentrum Hannover e.V. (LZH) and the Fraunhofer IWS Dresden as part of the publicly funded research project “Steigerung von Prozessstabilität und Schweißnahtqualität beim Remote-Laserschweißen durch gezielte Strömungsführung mittels Anlagenadaption” (RemoStAad) with the reference number IGF 18149 BG. The authors acknowledge the financial and administrative support by the Bundesministerium für Wirtschaft und Energie (BMWi), the Arbeitsgemeinschaft industrieller Forschungsvereinigungen “Otto von Guericke e.V.” (AiF), the Forschungskuratorium Maschinenbau e.V. (FKM), and the Forschungsvereinigung Schweißen und verwandte Verfahren e.V. (DVS).
Figure 01: Interior view of the processing chamber with installed components (left) and weld seam cross-sections without (right a) and with air flow control (right b).
Figure 02: Computed air flow field (left) and desirability plot revealing parameter constellations for an optimized cabin flow (right).
