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Greenlight Optics
 
How Lasers will Help You Get Better Gas Mileage
Wednesday, June 15, 2016

We all want our cars to be safer, which often results in making them heavier. But we also want them to get better gas mileage, which is tricky when they’re also getting heavier. While there are plenty of lightweight materials car makers can use, there is some difficulty in combining the materials safely with enough strength integrity. Enter lasers.

 

Most metals won’t bond unless coaxed with a lot of energy and expense. But researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) have developed a laser-powered solution that bonds aluminum and carbon fiber, an ideal, lightweight pairing.

 

Soldering and welding require clean surfaces. Which presents the traditional hurdle in bonding aluminum and carbon fiber: the surfaces of both components are impure and require large amounts of manual labor, grit blasting and toxic solvents to prepare them.

 

The scientists at ORNL have designed a way to peel off the top layer of material from the metal and the composite—a faster, cleaner, and less expensive way to prepare the surfaces for bonding. Even better, when the laser-cleaned materials were bonded and tested they proved to be 15% stronger and were able to absorb 200% more energy than the same materials bonded in the traditional fashion.

This process has only been accomplished in a laboratory setting, so it will need to be tested on a production line before the results can truly be evaluate. But we’re betting that in the very near future, lasers will be responsible for safer cars that achieve better gas mileage.

 





 
 

Blog Categories

  • General Interest
    • 08/17/2018 - Importance of Prototyping
    • 07/20/2018 - Projection Technology Enables
    • 06/15/2018 - Structured Light Projection En
    • 02/16/2018 - Design and Production of Optic
    • 01/26/2018 - Discovering the Revolutionary
    • 09/02/2017 - The Measure of Metrology
    • 08/01/2017 - What is a laminar flow bench?
    • 07/01/2017 - World Class Optical Design
    • 05/02/2017 - Understanding the Basics of LE
    • 11/14/2016 - What is ISO 9001?
    • 08/22/2016 - Current and Future Uses of DLP
    • 07/14/2016 - Use of Lasers in Medical Techn
    • 06/15/2016 - How Lasers will Help You Get B
    • 05/12/2016 - Why Photographers Love OLED Sc
    • 04/17/2016 - Ultra-Precision Machine Techno
    • 03/15/2016 - Future Global Demand for Surgi
    • 11/03/2015 - The Man Behind the Light-Emitt
    • 10/09/2015 - A Few More Approaches to Diamo
    • 09/21/2015 - Inside a Few Approaches to Dia
    • 08/20/2015 - The Device that Spurred the Cr
    • 07/08/2015 - What Does it Mean? The Final F
    • 06/23/2015 - What Does it Mean? Even More A
    • 05/22/2015 - What Does it Mean? Answers Beh
    • 04/13/2015 - Red Light, Green Light: How Tr
    • 03/13/2015 - What Does it Mean? The Answers
    • 02/12/2015 - What You May Have Missed with
    • 01/07/2015 - What Can Be Developed with Opt
    • 12/16/2014 - The Development of LEDs and Wh
    • 11/13/2014 - More Facts About Other Greenli
    • 10/06/2014 - A World Record-Breaking Laser
    • 09/17/2014 - An Inside Look at the Maser
    • 08/12/2014 - The 411 on LEDs
    • 07/08/2014 - Invention of the Laser
    • 06/10/2014 - Laser Pointers: Colors and Use
    • 05/21/2014 - How LEDs Appear Brighter to Ou
    • 04/02/2014 - Let There Be Light! The Boomin
    • 03/18/2014 - Practical Applications: Medica
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