In the Cluster of Excellence “Internet of Production” (IoP), two hundred scientists at RWTH Aachen University in cooperation with Fraunhofer ILT have set up a data center for controlling and monitoring industrial processes. The concept for this is based on a project for controlling laser systems developed at the Fraunhofer Institute for Laser Technology ILT and uses the open source software Kubernetes. A corresponding system has been running successfully at the institute for two years, and with it the institute can automatically and remotely install the software for new lasers in just a few minutes.

An ultrashort-pulse (USP) laser is a complex system that can ablate almost any material with micrometer precision. Numerous sensors control the machine and guide the laser process. The software that controls the components and reads the data from the sensors is accordingly diverse. In industrial production, many such systems are often used in parallel, and it is not uncommon to have fifty of them side by side. But how can their software be installed efficiently? And how can they be controlled centrally?

Moritz Kröger, a research associate at the Chair for Laser Technology LLT at RWTH Aachen University, an associated chair at Fraunhofer ILT, was faced with precisely this question: “With the current programmable logic controllers, you can control one device quite well, but hardly a dozen or even 100 at the same time.” In this context – of controlling 50 to 100 lasers – conventional concepts would foreseeably not be sufficient for installing new software for these systems and evaluating sensor data in real time.

The solution? “We completely reprogrammed the machine control system,” reports Kröger. “This allowed us to rely on proven open source software right from the start, which gives us more compatibility and development options for distributed systems.” This way, the institute is able to control and optimize laser processing operations that must take into account, for example, data from the scanner controls, sensor data from different sources and analysis data during the ongoing process. The project started in 2018, and the control system is now running stably in the beta phase at Fraunhofer ILT.

Read the full article in the August / September e-issue of PhotonicsViews, featured in the special compilation “Digital Tools, Design Software, Simulations”: Controlling 100 lasers automatically via the cloud