By Isamu Miyamoto, Yasuhiro Okamoto, Kristian Cvecek, Michael Schmidt, Henry Helvajian

While glass is widely used in different industrial field due to its excellent physical and chemical properties, there exist no reliable joining procedures of glass at the moment. We have developed a novel fusion welding procedure of glass that can weld glass even with high coefficient of thermal expansion (CTE) using ultrashort laser pulse (USLP).

Recently, ultrashort laser pulse (USLP) has brought a new wave of laser welding that enables crack-free welding of dielectric material like glass without pre- and post-heating. The advantages of USLP welding of glass are provided by embedded molten pool due to the unique laser absorption mechanism of nonlinear process. It has been shown that the stress due to the thermal shrinkage of the weld bead can be in principle prevented in USLP welding of glass where molten pool is embedded in bulk glass. The embedded molten pool also provides advantage of local melting selectively only at the joint interface. Continue reading →