Laser Edgeband Welding in Furniture Production

The Process

Edgeband welding is used to realize seamless connections between the wooden cover plate and plastic edgeband of a furniture item. While at the conventional glue of the band a visible glue joint remains, edgeband welding makes a more sophisticated look without visible joints possible. Furthermore, the connection is resistant to steam, which brings enormous advantages especially in the bath and kitchen.

The condition for a successful implementation of the method is a laser with possibly a homogeneous line focus. With its help, the edgeband is melted on one site immediately prior to feeding to the narrow area of the wooden plate. In a further process, it is pressed over press rollers against the narrow area. The surface heating is followed by a quick cooling so that the joint is already solid enough to be post-processed after the pressure section.

The Process Advantages of the Diode Lasers

The top-hat profile of the diode laser (homogeneous focal intensity distribution) and the customer individually-configurable Laserline zoom optic with adjustable line focus ensure an optimal process control during the edgeband welding. As there occur no high concentrations in the focus, a punctual overheating during melting is obsolete. Because of the adjustable zoom optic, all usual edgeband measures can be processed. The high process stability, enormous energy efficiency (50 percent efficiency rate), and the long lifetime of Laserline's diode lasers (over 30,000 operation hours with low maintenance effort) additionally guarantee excellent profitability for the method.

Application Examples

Wood processing machine with laser and zoom optics integration by Laserline diode lasers

Integration into a Wood Processing Machine

Quite possibly, one pioneering use of diode lasers in laser edging is the integration of laser and zoom optic into a wood processing machine. Thanks to the modular design of the Laserline beam sources and zoom optics, highly viable customer-individual adjustments are possible. The optics are equipped with motorized lens-systems, which thus allow for a precise and automatic tuning of the line focus. Thanks to the technically and economically optimal process control with suitable wood processing machines, productions in batch size 1 are also economically presentable.

Since 2010, the company IMA Klessmannn has been using fiber-coupled diode laser type LDM successfully for edgebanding with laser technology.