Press

Manufacturing and maintaining die-casting tools professionally is crucial to the foundry industry: As one of the most expensive assets, these tools play a decisive role in determining quality, efficiency, and costeffectiveness. Easily costing hundreds of thousands of euros, complex molds and inserts must be able to function over many years without interruption. They must also withstand extreme stress: In die casting, for example, the mold materials are exposed to temperatures of up to 700 °C, while the tools to mechanical forces of several hundred kilonewtons. Added to this are abrasive stresses on the tool surface and chemical attack by alloying elements in the casting materials. Thermal stresses and material fatigue lead to cracking, erosion, and abrasive wear. Even when the molds are designed optimally and manufactured carefully, their wear is an unavoidable factor that eventually means tools have to be replaced. If this occurs unexpectedly, it results in significant downstream costs.

In the HiPEQ project, a consortium of industry and research partners has de-veloped new laser-based approaches to enable miniaturized, robust beam sources for quantum technology. Among others, the consortium also used lasers to grow novel optical isolator crystals. Funded with €6.22 million by the German Federal Ministry of Research, Technology, and Space (BMFTR), the project achieved significant progress from November 2021 to July 2025. Fraunhofer ILT in Aachen played a key role by co-developing the laser proces-ses needed.

For three decades now, the AKL – International Laser Technology Congress has been established as a key platform for exchange within the laser community. From April 22–24, 544 experts from 21 countries, around 90 speakers, and 57 exhibiting companies and institutions flocked to AKL’26 in Aachen. There, during the Gerd Herziger Session, a panel of high-caliber experts reviewed the developments of the past 30 years and looked ahead to the future of increasingly ubiquitous laser technology.

With its planar, highly integrated XY scanner for industrial use (PIXIE), an upcoming spin-off of the Fraunhofer Institute for Laser Technology ILT in Aachen aims to set new performance standards. The 2D laser deflection system is faster and much more compact than today's galvanometer scanners. This makes it ideal for parallelized material processing with multi-scanner systems and high-power lasers, whose beam is divided into many independently scanned beams for this purpose. The multidisciplinary, diverse quartet of founders behind PIXIE has its sights set on further application markets.