Piranha-Whitney 12kW Fiber LASER – High Tech Construction
Piranha-Whitney uses polymer granite instead of steel for our machine bases. Polymer granite is heavier, more rigid, and most importantly, not susceptible to any kind of thermal changes. This makes our machines much more reliable and much more stable at the high speeds and accelerations that we can achieve.
The cutting head on the 12-kilowatt plate laser is a sealed unit. To handle 12,000 watts of the laser power, Whitney uses a reflective cutting head. Reflective cutting heads use specialty ground copper mirrors to replace the collimating and focusing lenses. Copper mirrors are internally cooled, allowing cooling to take place much more efficiently, eliminating prospective hot spots from contamination. With direct cooling, the mirror surface does not thermally distort. Transmissive optics, on the other hand, use lenses instead of mirrors. Lenses are cooled from the edges, yet the beam goes through the center of the lens. So when using high-power – 6000 watt and above – even the slightest contamination within the beam cap on the a lens will create a hotspot, causing distortion of the lens and a resultant shift in the focal point. This in turn yields unacceptable cut quality or cutting head failure.
The Piranha-Whitney 12-kilowatt plate laser is not only powerful, it’s also very smart. Whitney uses material parameter libraries, or MPLs, built into the CNC control. These MPLs control everything from peer cycles, to complex contouring geometry.
“The speed is fantastic for the price point. We looked at water jet and laser tables. [The Piranha plasma table] is literally one tenth the price. The edges on the finished product – there’s almost no deburring required because the edges are still smooth, straight from the cut. The fineness of the cut is under and eighth of an inch, which is fantastic. It just kind of seemed like a no-brainer. I love the Piranha brand. They do a fantastic job.”
-Steve Woulf, Woulf Engineering, Salt Lake City
Piranha Plasma Tables
Piranha’s plasma cutting machines set a new standard for light industrial metal fabrication. They have a lot of features not normally found at this price point.