At the beginning of April 2022 the iQonic partners Fraunhofer IOF and HiLase met at Fraunhofer IOF’s facilities in Jena (Germany) to discuss the opportunities and challenges of “high power disc laser crystal to heatsink bonding technologies”, using a ficonTEC CL1500 bonding platform and disc-shaped crystals that e.g. are manufactured at partner Filar OptoMaterials SRL, or that are commercial off-the-shelf components. Precise crystal to heatsink bonding with no contaminations and a homogeneous, small bonding gap is crucial for the performance of high-power disc laser systems.

During the bilateral workshop, partners discussed the process chain and data that is gathered throughout the complex processing. The remaining challenges have been identified and will be solved within the last months of the iQonic project, providing samples of the use case for evaluation at HiLase.

Disc to heatsink bonding is a typical process flow in manufacturing, where lots of individualized data is generated that provides information about the component state (scratch and dig, contamination, other irregularities) and the result of the assembly process (e.g. geometrical accuracy of the bond). Although the process is not yet connected to the sensor network and middleware of the iQonic architecture, it provides an early TRL3-4 example of how process development can be triggered to be transferred into the iQonic architecture.