Capability
Laser Polishing
Laser polishing remelts a few microns of a metal surface and lets surface tension pull the peaks down. Nothing is abraded and nothing is carried away, so the part keeps its dimension.
How it works
A small melt pool travels across the surface. Surface tension flattens the asperities that fit inside the pool, and the metal freezes before the beam comes back. Short pulses smooth fine roughness. Longer pulses drive flow across the pool and move material sideways. A continuous beam melts deeper, which is what a casting or a printed part needs.
Process envelope
| Mechanism | Remelting, mass neutralNothing is removed, so the part does not lose dimension. |
|---|---|
| Regimes | Pulsed for fine roughness, continuous wave for rough surfaces |
| Demonstrated on | Tool steel, stainless, titanium, printed metal parts |
| Measured results | Ti-6Al-4V, Ra 0.206 to 0.070 µmPulsed laser polishing of micro-milled samples under argon, as published by the UW–Madison group (Perry, Werschmoeller, Li, Pfefferkorn and Duffie, J. Manuf. Processes 11, 2009). Ra as reported, not converted. |
| Rate | 2.4 s/cm² at 750 W continuous waveOn a 15-5 stainless investment casting finished to 0.4 µm Sa under argon. |
| Honest limit | Waviness longer than the melt pool survivesSharp edges round by a few microns. Form error stays as it is. |
| Status | Process development and custom equipmentIt runs in the PhotonX lab on your part, not on a catalog machine. |
Hand polishing a mold or an implant costs hours of skilled work, and two parts finished by two people do not match. Laser polishing replaces the hand with a recipe. The beam melts a few microns of the surface and surface tension does the smoothing. The hundredth part runs the way the first one did.
The limits are worth stating first. The melt pool is small, so any feature wider than the pool survives the process. A wavy surface stays wavy and a bent part stays bent. Sharp edges round by a few microns. Polishing improves the finish you bring it, and it does not fix geometry.
LasX developed the process with Prof. Frank Pfefferkorn's lab at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, from 2014 through 2019, with NSF support. We designed and built the research machine — a 200 W NIR laser, scanner optics, an argon chamber and our own controller. We wrote the software that sets the energy of every pulse as the beam moves, at rates to 100 kHz. That control is why the results repeat, and the same architecture runs our production machines today. The work was published in CIRP Annals and the Journal of Laser Applications. LasX engineers Kevin Klingbeil and Jason Vockrodt co-authored the paper on what polishing does to part edges.
Send us the part. We run it in the PhotonX lab, measure the surface before and after, and write down what the process did. Then we talk about a machine.