The emergence of smart phones has greatly changed people’s lifestyles, and the continuous improvement of people’s living standards has also put forward higher requirements for smart phones: in addition to the continuous upgrade of system, hardware and other functional configurations, the appearance of mobile phones has also become the focus of competition among mobile phone manufacturers. In the process of innovation of appearance materials, glass materials are welcomed by manufacturers for their many advantages such as changeable shapes, good impact resistance, and controllable costs. They are increasingly used in mobile phones, including mobile phone front covers, rear covers, etc. Covers, camera covers, filters, fingerprint recognition films, prisms, etc.
Although glass materials have many advantages, their fragile characteristics bring many difficulties to the processing process, such as cracks and rough edges. In addition, the special-shaped cutting of the earpiece, front camera, fingerprint film, etc. also puts forward higher requirements for processing technology. How to solve the processing problems of glass materials and improve product yield has become a common goal in the industry, and it is urgent to promote innovation in glass cutting technology.
Glass cutting process comparison
Traditional knife glass cutting
Traditional glass cutting processes include knife wheel cutting and CNC grinding cutting. The glass cut by the cutter wheel has large chipping and rough edges, which will greatly affect the strength of the glass. Moreover, the glass cut by the cutter wheel has a low yield and a low material utilization rate. After cutting, complex post-processing steps are required. The speed and accuracy of the cutter wheel will drop significantly when cutting special shapes. Some special-shaped full-screen screens cannot be cut with the cutter wheel because the corner is too small. CNC has higher precision than the cutter wheel, with an accuracy of ≤30 μm. The edge chipping is smaller than the cutter wheel, about 40 μm. The disadvantage is that the speed is slow.
Traditional laser glass cutting
With the development of laser technology, lasers have also appeared in glass cutting. Laser cutting is fast and highly precise. The cuts have no burrs and are not limited by shape. The edge chipping is generally less than 80 μm.
Traditional laser cutting of glass uses an ablation mechanism, using focused high-energy-density laser to melt or even vaporize the glass, and high-pressure auxiliary gas to blow away the remaining slag. Because the glass is fragile, the light spot with high overlap rate will accumulate excessive heat on the glass, causing the glass to crack. Therefore, the laser cannot use the light spot with high overlap rate for one cutting. Usually, a galvanometer is used for high-speed scanning to cut the glass layer by layer. Layer removal, the general cutting speed is less than 1mm/s.
Ultrafast laser glass cutting
In recent years, ultrafast lasers (or ultrashort pulse lasers) have achieved rapid development, especially in the application of glass cutting, which has achieved excellent performance and can avoid problems such as edge chipping and cracks that are prone to occur in traditional machine cutting methods. It has the advantages of high precision, no micro-cracks, broken or fragmented problems, high edge crack resistance, and no need for secondary manufacturing costs such as washing, grinding, and polishing. It reduces costs while greatly improving workpiece yield and processing efficiency.
Post time: May-17-2024
