Artistic processing on acrylic materials using a segmented pixel drawing method with a slab, RF excited CO2 laser

There have been various processing methods such as marking, masking, and rapid prototyping system have been typically known as an attractive application of high power laser based on single stroke drawing. We have proposed a segmented pixel drawing (SPD) method which creates a surface by laser in a segmented pixel-base, in which various surface effects can be given such as fluent, opaque, and rugged tones. This can be referred to as a digital way of display. Experiments of SPD method were performed on acrylic surfaces by the pixel processing base with a pixel size of 2mmx2mm. The pixel patterns in this study were variously demonstrated by means of the varied density of the dot-matrix. From the degree of transparency of produce SPD pixels, visual effects of surfaces were analyzed to evaluate gray-scaled tones of produced pixels. The proposed method based SPD would offer a new possibility to realize more sophisticated sculpture on acrylic surfaces supported by visual effects using image information. In addition to the SPD, coloring on acrylic surfaces has been successfully made using the CO2 laser. This coloring process was performed based on a heat effect due to CO2 laser irradiation on acrylic materials, the surface of which was exposed with a dye-containing liquid sheet flow.