By James Van Howe | Posted: 12 June 2013
Yesterday began two days of laser-driven fusion talks punctuated by a visit to the nearby National Ignition Facilitiy (NIF) at Lawrence Livermore National Lab (LLNL) as part of CLEO Applications and Technology Special Symposium: The Path to Sustainable Energy: Laser Driven Inertial Fusion Energy.
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By James Van Howe | Posted: 3 May 2011
The head of the student machine shop at Cornell, Bob Snedeker ( Sned), liked to remind us in a sarcastic fashion that its easier to take material away from a workpiece than to put it back on- warning: be careful about how much you take off as you cut. Or as the old saying goes in carpentry, “measure twice, cut once.” This is not necessarily true for laser machining of metals. Laser cladding, which was one of the topics discussed in the tutorial, AMB1 “Industrial Applications of Laser Materials Processing,” by Dr. Marshall Jones from GE Global Research, is a technique in which material can be added to a workpiece where too much was accidentally cut off. Like Play-doh, you can just put back on what you need. Wow, if only I could have laser-cladded my tool bits, and special nut and bolt we were required to make in order to graduate from machine-shop training! Sned had high standards and we spent many hours to make a piece to find out we needed to start over with fresh stock. It was back to the grindstone (literally!) until those bits had a perfect angle and facet.
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