Cutting glass substrates with dual-laser beams

In order to improve the cutting quality, a dual-laser-beam method was proposed to cut glass substrates in the current study, where a focused CO2-laser beam was used to scribe a straight line on the substrate, and a defocused CO2-laser beam was used to irradiate on the scribing line to generate a tensile stress and separate the substrate. The finite-element-method (FEM) software ANSYS was applied to calculate the temperature distribution and the resulting thermal stress filed. Through experimental study, it concluded that the glass substrate can be separated along an expected path with dual-laser beams and the cutting quality can be improved comparing with the cutting using a defocused laser beam alone. The relation between the cutting speed and the defocused laser power was also investigated in cutting glass with this method. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.