Looking to reduce your costs?

After a challenging 18 months, many manufacturers are looking for opportunities to reduce costs and give an overdue boost to the bottom line with no impact on quality. As laser cutting operations often use a sizeable volume of nitrogen or oxygen assist gas, it’s worth re-visiting your gas supply service to ensure it is right for your business. The choice of gas supply method plays a critical role in ensuring output efficiency is maximised and costs and downtime are reduced.

Many laser gas customers start by using cylinder packs - where multiple cylinders are manifolded to offer a large volume of gas on a relatively small footprint. For small to medium gas demand this is a good solution, particularly, if you choose a supplier with large volume cylinder packs. In fact, with 233m3 (233,000 gaseous litres of gas), the Air Products 300 bar high pressure nitrogen 18 cylinder packs have up to 40% more gas than conventional cylinder packs, offering significant cost and operational benefits, even for even the most powerful laser machine.

For larger demand, it is worth considering cryogenic supply in small tanks. Air Products CryoEase® service starts at 200 litre tanks, suitable for a wide range of applications. The CryoEase® service makes life easier for the production manager by taking the hassle out of stock control and management. Each CryoEase® tank is monitored by Air Products to ensure a continuous gas supply is maintained at all times. What’s even more relevant for laser cutting applications, is the high-pressure refill capability available nationally across the Air Products’ fleet. This means there is no need to vent down your tank pressure and lose valuable gas and production time during the refill process. Switching to a CryoEase® service is a straightforward process, often installations are pallet-mounted and do not require planning permission. From start to finish, once the system has been designed a CryoEase® installation can be completed in as little as four weeks.

If you are new to laser cutting or buying an additional machine, it is really important to consider your gas delivery mode and supplier early in the process. The correct choice of gas supply will have an impact on your overall laser running operation costs and laser cut quality.