From Our Engineering Applications Team

Below are some documents of or technology at work.

	Solutions for Next Generation Stent Manufacturing The next generation of vascular stents is likely to be dominated by bioabsorbable devices. These low melting and relatively soft materials are notoriously difficult to machine with traditional tools. Raydiance’s ultrafast laser platform integrated with Rofin’s StarCut Tube workstation provides a turnkey solution for the challenges of the new materials and designs.
	Precision Ablation of Microfluidic Features in Polycarbonate To realize this enormous potential of microfluidics applications, precise, reliable and cost-effective ablation technologies will be needed to manufacture these advanced devices. Here we have demonstrated the ability to use Raydiance ultrafast laser technology to machine precise microfluidic features in 275 µm thick polycarbonate sheet stock. The ablation resulted in very clean cuts, with there being no evidence of any heat affected zones (HAZ).
	Precision Ablation of Polymers Commonly Used in the Medical Devices Market Polymers commonly used in medical applications were machined with the Raydiance ultrafast platform to demonstrate the sytem’s versatile capabilities. A range of materials were cleanly ablated with no evidence of thermal damage or discoloration. Raydiance  offers a ready solution for the challenges of precisely machining these soft, low melting point materials of keen interest to the medical device manufacturing market.
	Precision Ablation of Thick Wall Nitinol Tubing for Stent Applications In this Application Spotlight we highlight results in machining thick-walled samples (460 µm), as well as finer structures in what one would term “microstents” with the Raydiance S ultrafast laser platform. In both regimes, the Raydiance system provides excellent edge quality with no apparent thermal effects.
	Athermal Ablation of Hard and Soft Tissue The Raydiance platform, with its ability to ablate at micron resolution—literally cell by cell—autonomously, if desired, and without introducing heat to the target area, has the potential to rapidly advance therapeutic innovation in the coming years.
	Surface and Sub-Surface Marking of Metals, Fused Silica, and Quartz Clean, precise, and high contrast micron-resolution markings—a variety of alpha-numeric, 2-D matrix and sub-surface marks—were easily machined with the Raydiance precision marking platform in Nitinol and 316 stainless steel tubes, flat machined Inconel®, fused silica disks and quartz tubes. There were no apparent heat affected zones in any of the materials ablated. The results of this proof-of-concept experiment indicate that the Raydiance precision marking platform provides a fast and precise method for marking and tracking high value medical implants, pharmaceutical containers, and other small medical devices that cannot tolerate any thermal or mechanical damage.