Practitioners working across the filter screen, spinneret plate, atomizing disc and flow control plate industries have almost all encountered a typical order of this kind: the customer requires tens of millions of micro-holes to be drilled on a single plate, with a 0.1mm pore diameter, and strict requirements of zero burr, no deformation and 100% pore penetration rate.

When receiving such an order, most people’s first reaction is usually "let’s drill it with a drill press". But a simple calculation will tell you this solution is not feasible: for 10 million holes, even if you drill 10 holes per minute, it will take nearly 7000 hours, equivalent to 290 days of non-stop uninterrupted operation. Worse still, the tiny drill bit has to be replaced after drilling only a few hundred holes, plus extra troubles such as tool breakage, burr formation and part deformation, this order is almost impossible to complete with traditional processing methods.

With 29 years of experience in precision micro-hole drilling, Jiajiayong Laser is here to talk about how laser technology can easily pull off this seemingly "mission impossible".

I. Why traditional drill presses cannot handle this order?

Tool lifespan is an inherent bottleneck

For a 0.1mm diameter micro-drill, its service life on steel or stainless steel parts usually only allows it to drill 200 to 500 holes. 10 million holes mean you need 20,000 to 50,000 drill bits, leading to a tool cost of hundreds of thousands of RMB alone. In addition, each tool change requires 3 to 5 minutes of downtime, and the accumulated downtime will exceed 1000 hours, which will extend the actual processing cycle to more than one year.

Burrs and deformation are unavoidable

Mechanical drilling is a contact processing method: the drill bit will generate extrusion force on the thin plate, causing burrs to curl up at the edge of the hole and overall deformation of the thin plate. For a 0.1mm pore, the burr height can reach 0.02-0.05mm, which will seriously undermine the pore penetration rate. The subsequent deburring process is another time-consuming and costly step.

Quality consistency is hard to guarantee

As the drill bit wears, the pore diameter will gradually shrink, and the pore size difference between the first plate and the last plate can exceed ±10μm. For filter products that require 100% pore penetration, such fluctuation will directly cause a sharp rise in the scrap rate.

II. Laser Solution: Non-contact, burr-free, no deformation

Laser drilling fundamentally solves all the above pain points. The laser beam can be focused to a diameter below 3μm, and no mechanical force is applied to the workpiece during processing, thus bringing the following advantages:

• 1. No burr, no broken hole: The material is removed through vaporization, resulting in a smooth hole wall with no flanging or burrs at the edge.

• 2. No deformation: Without cutting force, the thin plate will not distort, and even 0.05mm thick stainless steel foil can remain completely flat.

• 3. 100% pore penetration: Every hole is fully penetrated with no residual blockage, ensuring unobstructed flow of fluid or gas.

Take Jiajiayong Laser’s equipment as an example: for drilling 0.1mm holes on a 0.2mm thick stainless steel plate, the processing time for a single hole only takes 0.01-0.02 seconds, and the theoretical processing time for 10 million holes is less than 60 hours. Equipped with a dual-station rotary stage and automatic loading & unloading system, the actual production line can realize 24-hour unattended operation, and complete delivery within one week.

III. Efficiency Comparison: Laser drilling is more than 20 times faster than traditional drill presses

We can make a concrete calculation for the scenario of drilling 10 million 0.1mm holes on stainless steel plates:

Comparison Items	Traditional Mechanical Drilling	Jiajiayong Laser Drilling
Single hole processing time	5-10s (including tool advance and retraction)	0.01-0.02s
Tool change / downtime	3 minutes of downtime after every 200 holes drilled	No tool change required
Total processing time	~7000 hours (nearly 300 days)	~60 hours (less than 3 days)
Post-processing	Deburring required	No post-processing needed
Scrap rate	3%-5%	<0.5%
Labor requirement	2-3 workers for shift duty	1 worker can supervise multiple machines, unattended operation supported

Laser drilling is more than 20 times more efficient than traditional drill presses, with higher quality and lower cost. Most importantly, no mold opening is required for laser processing: customers can directly upload CAD drawings to the equipment, the system will automatically generate the processing program, and sampling can be started on the very same day.

IV. Core Competitiveness of Jiajiayong Laser

For 29 years, Jiajiayong Laser has been focused on precision micro-hole processing, and has in-depth technical cooperation with the Laser Institute of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. We have accumulated more than 500 successful cases in the mass micro-hole processing field covering filter screens, atomizing discs and spinneret plates.

• 1. Minimum achievable pore diameter: 3μm

• 2. Processing accuracy: ±1μm

• 3. Maximum processing speed: 100 holes per second

• 4. Material compatibility: Stainless steel, copper, aluminum, titanium alloy, ceramics, polymers, etc.

• 5. Supported pore shapes: Round holes, square holes, special-shaped holes, conical holes, dense hole arrays

• 6. Automation functions: Visual positioning, automatic loading & unloading, assembly line integration, MES (Manufacturing Execution System) data traceability

Our equipment can realize the effect of "one machine equals one factory": the full process from drawing to finished product is completed automatically without secondary processing, featuring short production cycle, low cost and high efficiency.

V. Our Advice for You: Verify with real sampling data

10 million 0.1mm holes are impossible to produce with traditional drill presses, but can be easily completed with laser technology. However, since the material, thickness and pore diameter tolerance of each product vary, the optimal processing parameters need to be verified through actual sampling.

Send a batch of your workpieces and drawings to our application verification center in Shenzhen, and we will provide free sampling service, and issue a detailed process report within 3-5 working days, including pore diameter CPK, SEM photos of the hole wall, processing cycle estimation and cost comparison. If the result meets your expectation, we can further discuss the customized equipment solution; even if it does not fit your needs, you will get a set of professional process data which is also of great reference value for your subsequent process improvement.

For 29 years, the tenet of Jiajiayong Laser has never changed: Make every difficult-to-drill hole easily accessible across the world. For your 10 million micro-hole order, we are here to work with you to easily get it done with laser technology.