Engraving Speed
Today’s post is about the engraving speed. Because many customers have questions about this.
Normally, the engraving speed is determined by the laser source box frequency and the speed of the scan galvanometer.
The laser source box frequency means how many times the laser source box emits the laser in one second. A laser, for one time, will make one dot on the crystal. So if you give 3000Hz for the laser source box, that means 3000dots/second. And the frequency can be adjusted, if you give 4000Hz, that means 4000dots/second. However, this speed can’t be higher without limit due to the limitations of technology and materials.
I don’t know very well for others, but I know for our laser source box, the maximum frequency is 7000Hz. That means, in theory, the laser source box can engrave 420000dots/minute. This is just a theoretical inference.
If we want to know the real engraving speed, we need to consider the galvanometer's movement.
A scan galvanometer is also called a Galvo scanning system, which is a high-speed scanning device. The scan galvanometer is developed from the galvanometer. It controls the deflection angle of the reflective lens by changing the voltage, and then controls the focal position of the reflected laser. So the laser can burn the image into or on the object.
So, how fast the scan galvanometer can move also affects the engraving speed. Like that, for our machine, the max move speed for the scan galvanometer is 3500dots/second. Does this mean that our machine’s engraving speed is 210000dots/second? In theory, it is right.
However, in the real image engraving, the galvanometer can’t work all the time, because dots are not evenly distributed in the real machine, and we need to wait for the Z axis to move. So the real engraving time is about 150000dots/second. And this speed range, according to the different images.
As a crystal 3D laser company, we usually don’t suggest that the customer adjust the speed too high, because the speed will affect the engraving quality. If the speed is too fast, the position will not be very accurate, or the dots will not be bright.
Many times, different parameters of a machine are interrelated, and changing one parameter is likely to cause changes in other parameters, sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worse.
However, some would like to change the spare part to improve the machine parameters. However, according to our company’s research, no scan galvanometer has very good performance in speed; they are more focused on the position accuracy. Maybe we need to wait for the technology innovation.