stock here: I am a mad scientist, but this guy is me squared. Check out his other videos also.
Comment: CNC Fiber laser cutter operator here (LVD Phoenix, 12KW IPG laser source). I’ve personally witnessed the setup I’m working with, be able to cut 30mm stainless steel and Aluminium (highly reflective and pretty ‘abrasive’ to the head’s built in safety windows). It’s crazy what these things can do.
Every material has it’s own sweetspot for efficient cutting. Sometimes there’s a trade-off between speed and cutting quality (edge squareness, burrs forming on the underside of the parts, color change due to metal overheating, etc etc), but most materials can be cut quite nicely without losing too much quality. It’s an art to cut parts with a nice accurate, sharp, glassy looking side, and me and my fellow lasergods take pride in delivering the shiny.
One of the things fiber setups can do that traditional CO2 lasers can’t is store energy and release it as a massive but short blast. We use it to strike a hole right through metal, after which we switch back to “normal laser cutting” and spiral down the side of the “Strike hole” to enlarge the hole enough for sufficient amounts of “helper gas” to be able to blow through the plate (in our case either Oxygen or Nitrogen). After sufficient gasflow is achieved, we re-engage the laser and follow the cutpath while maintaining a set gaspressure. Laser does the melty bit, helper-gas does the material removal bit.
In a process similar to what the LHC does with particles, these laser sources can cycle photons inside a fiberloop and add on to them almost infinitely, and at a set time, they do a switchover into the cutting head, releasing all those coherent photons into the metal, instantly vaporising it, after which the helper gas can blow away the metal plasma (yes, it’s turning the metal into a plasma). Some motion systems and head leveling sensors do the job of maintaining a set height above (and a set x,y position on) the plate to be cut, and the rest is just G-code. Most of the time, all you need is basic knowledge of how to draw a shape in Inkscape, and you can cut it on the machine.
Tldr; These laser sources may be advertised as having an output capacity of 12KW, but they can do MUCH MUCH more than that, for small fractions of a second at a time. And most of the time, all you need is a short blast to “clear a path”.