controlled_burn
Plastic
- Joined
- Mar 25, 2019
For starters, the machine is a Mazak SpaceGear U44 2.5kW CO2 laser. I'm absolutely losing my mind with this thing because we recently had the machine serviced by two different companies (one being Mazak), and we still can't seem to get the power up to what it should be - which is about 2350 W considering losses from all of the 11 mirrors the beam has to hit.
We just had our 4,000-hour pm and all of the mirrors were replaced and cleaned as needed. A complete alignment and spot check was also done and the power was about 2,200 when the technician left. Both technicians that came mentioned that we could be having a beam purge air quality issue (dry air in the beam path not being clean/dry enough leading to beam distortion). To see if that was the issue, we got a few bottles of ultra-high purity nitrogen and hooked that up directly to our beam path using the compression fitting near the z mirror. After a few hours of nitrogen being hooked up, we saw barely a noticeable difference in the power. This leads me to think that our shop air, which is cleaned/dried in the three-stage dryer inside the chiller, is just fine. I'm also a little nervous about putting undried nitrogen directly into the bellows without going through the dryer in the chiller unit.
Where I'm at now is I am thinking there's an issue with debris of some kind in the beam path. We recently cleaned the bellows and what mirrors we could reach just the other day, and now we have dirty mirrors again (see photo). Our power is slowly dropping and making it so we can't cut 1/4" stainless anymore, which is the majority of what we cut. Another important fact is that we also had our laser tubes replaced in the recent pm. The technician measured the power at the resonator and it was right at 2500 W, so we're losing power somewhere between the resonator and the torch.
Has anyone had any issues like this before? The technicians from Mazak that I talked to said that it was likely dirty bellows, but we cleaned them and they really didn't seem that dirty in the first place.
Thanks in advance!
We just had our 4,000-hour pm and all of the mirrors were replaced and cleaned as needed. A complete alignment and spot check was also done and the power was about 2,200 when the technician left. Both technicians that came mentioned that we could be having a beam purge air quality issue (dry air in the beam path not being clean/dry enough leading to beam distortion). To see if that was the issue, we got a few bottles of ultra-high purity nitrogen and hooked that up directly to our beam path using the compression fitting near the z mirror. After a few hours of nitrogen being hooked up, we saw barely a noticeable difference in the power. This leads me to think that our shop air, which is cleaned/dried in the three-stage dryer inside the chiller, is just fine. I'm also a little nervous about putting undried nitrogen directly into the bellows without going through the dryer in the chiller unit.
Where I'm at now is I am thinking there's an issue with debris of some kind in the beam path. We recently cleaned the bellows and what mirrors we could reach just the other day, and now we have dirty mirrors again (see photo). Our power is slowly dropping and making it so we can't cut 1/4" stainless anymore, which is the majority of what we cut. Another important fact is that we also had our laser tubes replaced in the recent pm. The technician measured the power at the resonator and it was right at 2500 W, so we're losing power somewhere between the resonator and the torch.
Has anyone had any issues like this before? The technicians from Mazak that I talked to said that it was likely dirty bellows, but we cleaned them and they really didn't seem that dirty in the first place.
Thanks in advance!