In “Optical Systems,” Fraunhofer ILT focuses on providing its partners with considerable expertise in beam shaping and beam guiding, frequency conversion as well as in design, layout and packaging of optical components.

Commercial and self-developed software tools are used to design or optimize optics. With special algorithms, Fraunhofer ILT designs optical free-form surfaces so that the industry can manufacture them later with laser-based processes. Modern diffractive or refractive optical elements, for example, can bring light into almost any shape by means of adapted diffraction structures. Complex beam profiles or patterns can be realized as well as a distribution of the energy of a beam to a whole array of similar partial beams. Integrated into new laser systems, the optical systems Fraunhofer ILT develops enable increased productivity compared to conventional techniques, even in precision manufacturing on the micrometer scale.

Fraunhofer ILT is developing scanners that can deflect laser radiation very quickly and at high precision, and apply it specifically to workpieces. The institute either adapts commercially available scanners to specific applications or develops new systems for drilling, ablation, cutting, welding, additive manufacturing or metrological tasks.