Laser beam cutting and welding of coronary stents

Coronary stents are thin-walled and mesh-structured metallic implants, which are made generally by laser beam cutting of high-precision tubes of 90-120 micrometer thickness. The tube material can be 316L stainless steel or L605 type cobalt-chromium alloy. The paper present how laser settings influence geometry and surface quality of the kerf and residual stresses, which play very important role in the precision of stent strut homogeneity. Hungarian Tentaur stent was developed 15 years ago. This coil stent made of 145 micrometers thick stainless steel wire contains 9-25 joints produced by electric resistance projection welding. Developments were bringing out for increasing flexibility of Tentaur stent, and a new design and a new tech-nology was elaborated, which’s based on laser beam mi-crowelding. TentaFlex stent also is constructed from austenitic stainless steel wire, but it does not contain any wire-crossing joint, because stent struts are configured from sinusoidal helix. Stent contains only two welded joints at its ends. Laser welding experiences of these joints are presented in the paper. A Trumpf PowerWeld Nd:YAG laser work station was used for welding, and after optimization of laser settings joints can’t produces from only one side of the coiled stent