Fibre laser cutting of polymer tubes for stents manufacturing

Nowadays, stents are the main treatment modality for atherosclerosis. Although metallic stents are effective many concerns still remain. Bioresorbable stents (BRSs) were introduced to overcome these limitations with important advantages. In this paper the authors aim to study the effect of fiber laser cutting over polycaprolactone (PCL), polylactide acid (PLA), and PLA-PCL tubes for stent manufacturing. The effect of Power, Cutting Speed, and Number of Passes over Penetration, Precision, and Dross is presented. Results have shown the difficulty of cut PLA with 1.08 um wavelength lasers, being impossible to achieve a complete penetration both the PLA tubes, as composite tubes. Nevertheless, with PCL tubes, fibre laser has been able to achieve dimensional precisions above than 95.75 %. Fibre laser has been shown to be a profitable tool to manufacture polycaprolactone stents.