With international competition and industrial upgrading, the demand for high-precision and high-efficiency processing technology in the manufacturing industry continues to grow, and the market potential of water guided laser processing technology is gradually emerging. In high-end manufacturing fields such as aerospace, electronic manufacturing, medical equipment, and automotive industry, there are extremely high requirements for material processing quality and accuracy. Traditional processing methods are difficult to meet these needs, and water guided laser processing technology, with its unique advantages, has become an ideal choice to solve these problems. It is applied to high-precision cutting and drilling of semiconductor materials, ceramics, diamonds, thermal barrier coatings, hard alloys, and composite materials in the above-mentioned strategic emerging fields, and has huge prospects for large-scale application.

The basic principle of water guided laser is to guide the laser source through total reflection of the water beam. The laser beam is focused through a transparent window onto the nozzle at the bottom of the coupled water cavity, coupled with a hair like water beam, and undergoes total reflection at the interface between the water beam and air (the water beam is a water fiber), achieving laser conduction. The laser beam is irradiated onto the workpiece to ablate and remove material through melting and vaporization. Water guided laser processing technology, through the improvement and innovation of traditional laser processing and water jet cutting technology, has broad application prospects in high-end manufacturing due to its high energy density and high precision.

The advantages of water guided laser processing technology

Traditional processing methods mainly include mechanical processing, thermal cutting, and traditional laser cutting. These methods have certain limitations in terms of accuracy, efficiency, and impact on materials. For example, mechanical processing is prone to micro damage and thermal deformation on the surface of materials due to tool wear and contact processing, which limits processing accuracy and surface quality. Thermal cutting methods such as plasma cutting, flame cutting, and traditional laser cutting can quickly cut thick materials, but their high-temperature treatment process can easily increase the heat affected zone of the material, generate thermal stress and microcracks, and reduce the mechanical properties and durability of the finished product.

However, the water guided laser processing technology combines the dual advantages of water and laser, overcomes many shortcomings of traditional processing methods, and has significant advantages. As shown in Figure 2, the water guided laser guides the transmission of the laser beam through water flow, effectively cooling the processing area with high specific heat capacity water, reducing the heat affected zone, thereby avoiding material deformation and microcracks, and improving processing accuracy and quality (Figure 3). Compared with traditional laser cutting and ultrafast laser processing technologies, water guided laser technology has advantages such as near no heat affected zone, small taper, flat cutting surface, high precision, and large depth to diameter ratio. It has huge market application space in the fields of metal weakly rigid parts, high-precision parts, and large depth to diameter ratio micro hole processing, and helps in the production and manufacturing of high-end precision parts.