Glass is widely used in industries such as construction, automotive, photovoltaic energy, and containers, possessing properties such as transparency and high strength. In practical applications, it is unavoidable to drill holes in glass.
Currently, most glass drilling uses mechanical drilling methods. Glass drill bits need to be replaced regularly, resulting in high maintenance costs. The drilling process also requires water cooling of the drill bits and a cooling water recovery system, and the processing quality and precision are difficult to guarantee.
With the development of laser technology, glass laser cutting has emerged. High peak power and high energy density lasers can instantly vaporize glass, and combined with motion control, the required holes can be cut at designated locations. Glass laser cutting has advantages such as small taper, high precision, minimal chipping, no consumables, and maintenance-free operation. It is also easy to integrate into automated production.
Ratel Laser is a laser company positioned as a supplier serving glass precision manufacturing, offering a full range of 20W-500W tunable pulsed MOPA lasers and various high-performance new customized products. Following research and development, we launched glass drilling series lasers, featuring high beam quality and high peak power, with adjustable pulse width for glass cutting, offering high efficiency and excellent results.
We conducted cutting tests on round, square, oblong, and irregularly shaped holes in various types of translucent glass, including ordinary household glass, photovoltaic glass, single-sided frosted glass, and glass containers. The results show that the drilling series are suitable for cutting holes in various glass materials, offering flexible hole shape design, clean inner walls with minimal dust residue, low glass damage, and edge chipping as low as 300μm, demonstrating high efficiency.
As can be seen from the test photos above, our drilling series high-peak power lasers can achieve round and square hole cutting in ordinary glass and photovoltaic glass of different thicknesses, producing smooth hole walls, minimal edge chipping, almost no taper, and stable free fall even after continuous multi-hole cutting.
Cutting times for different thicknesses and hole diameters of ordinary glass were tested, and all were completed within 10 seconds, exceeding the efficiency of mechanical drilling. Furthermore, we tested cutting the same hole diameter; higher power resulted in faster efficiency, with 200W being 2.5 times more efficient than 80W, and the results were essentially the same.
Drilling Time for Ordinary Glass of Different Thicknesses at 200W
Hole Diameter Thickness 5mm 10mm 15mm 20mm
2mm 1.9s 2.5s 4.2s 5.9s
4mm / 3s 3.4s /
5mm / 4.2s 4.8s /
6mm / 5s 6s /
8mm / 10s / /
The drilling series lasers can be used for efficient and high-quality glass drilling, primarily due to the high performance, whose main specifications are as follows.
80/120/200 Specifications
M2 <1.5
Average Power (W): 80 / 120 / 200
Peak Power (kW): 80
Pulse Width (ns): 2~50
Repetition Frequency (kHz): 1~3000
Power Instability (%): <5
