HULL, ENGLAND-Rofin-Sinar UK Ltd. has won the Queen’s Award for Enterprise: Innovation. The award was conferred on the sealed gas laser manufacturer on the birthday of Her Majesty the Queen, Saturday April 21st. The Queen’s Award is one of the UK’s most prestigious awards for business performance and recognizes companies that have demonstrated commercial success through innovative products or services. The judging is tough, and in order to win, companies must be able to demonstrate substantial improvement in business performance and commercial success, to levels that are outstanding for the size of the applicant’s operations. This can be for outstanding innovation, sustained over not less than two years, or continuous innovation and development, sustained over not less than five years.
The award has been made in recognition of Rofin-Sinar’s successful development of the ROFIN SCx60. Rofin-Sinar managing director Ken Lipton explained the innovations that have made this product a commercial success: “The SCx 60 is the highest power commercially available RF-excited diffusion-cooled CO2 laser available on the market. Its compactness and mechanical stability, compared to slow-flow equivalents, enables it to be mounted directly onto robots or moving flat bed cutters. Generating, controlling, and coupling the 15 kW of RF power into the compact discharge presented the development team with some unique technical challenges requiring a completely new RF topology. The laser, RF power supply, and controller each contain its own microprocessor-monitoring product status and user demand.”
Lipton continued, “In addition, the optical output is feedback controlled to maintain power to better than 1% and the new adaptive software ‘learns’ the performance characteristics of each tube. The stable mechanical structure generates an exceptionally pure mode with an M-squared value of < 1.2. This allows the laser to be used for demanding die-board cutting applications and also as a versatile cutter for both metallic and non-metallic materials. The exceptional controllability of this product has proven ideal for complex scribing and perforating applications and in the challenging engraving market.”
“We are delighted to receive the Queen’s Award for Innovation,” added Lipton. “Although the award is primarily granted for outstanding innovation, it also requires the winning products to be commercially successful and so every member of our company has contributed in some way to help us qualify. We have been designing and producing innovative lasers on this site for over ten years now, exporting 96% of our output around the world.”