CASE STUDIES
Medical Device Manufacturing with Lasers
Customer’s Challenge
The customer’s innovative medical manufacturing product required precise laser ablation of polymer and metallic components that were sensitive to thermal and oxidative degradation. They struggled to develop a laser process that could meet the quality and throughput requirements to enable their product.
Requirements
- Precision cut to tight mechanical tolerances
- Clean laser ablation of polymer and metal with no thermal or chemical degradation
- High speed process to support manufacturing throughput
Owens-TLS Solution
Owens Design and Turner Laser Systems partnered to investigate laser suitability, developed a process to customer specification and created a proposal for a customized laser tool with the selected laser process, custom fixture and material handling. The customer was forced to change to a more thermally sensitive material after issuing the tool PO. Owens and TLS quickly worked to develop a new process delivering the required quality and modified the tool proposal to meet the new requirements. The customized tool was installed on time and started running pilot production the next day. While the tool was being built, TLS provided contract manufacturing support to further refine processes and build customer samples.
How Long Did It Take from Start to Finish?
3 months to develop process + 5 months to design, build and install the pilot line tool and start pilot production.
Customer’s Success
- TLS developed a production capable laser process for the customer part and created a new process when the customer was unexpectedly force to change materials.
- Owens Design manufactured a production ready tool with a production capable laser process to accelerate customer time-to-market
- Customer pilot production started immediately the day after delivery and installation of laser tool.
- TLS continues to provide support, service, guidance, mentoring and expertise on how to best use the tool, develop new recipes/processes and improve product manufacturing processes.
- Customer successfully takes their product development to a major milestone, with the laser processing being a key part of the success
- In just over 1 year from first contact with TLS, the customer successfully scaled up production at a 3rd party CM with TLS support.
Customer Quotes
“TLS helped us to identify critical process parameters in regard to laser selection… Once the specific laser source was identified, TLS worked closely with us to define tolerances and other specifications such that he could design the appropriate light engine to handle the laser processes we required. As part of that work, [they] engaged [their partner] Owens Design to construct an integrated system with all pertinent safety and protections such that it was compliant with our EH&S and all local ordinances... The resulting system is reliable, ergonomic, robust, and even rather attractive in my opinion.”
“The combination of expertise and seamless integration between TLS and the ODI team (even to the point of co-location) makes it very hard to beat, in the level of communication, handoff between teams, and reduced cost associated with the combined bid and consolidated development site…. I look forward to working with them on more projects in the future.”
“TLS software is extraordinarily flexible. We required real capacity to develop our own applications as the system sees a lot of research use as well as having production applications. The level of customization possible far exceeded expectations.”