Cali Lasers is a family owned business based out of Livermore, California.

Since lasers were invented, one of the promising applications has always been stripping coatings from surfaces. Concentrated laser energy does an excellent job of “ablating” coatings by quickly heating the coating material to the point of chemical dissociation. This happens so fast, there is negligible conduction of heat to the substrate. And if the laser can “see” a coated surface, it can strip the coating, regardless of the complexity of the surface. The obstacle to laser ablation has always been that any laser powerful enough to strip coatings quickly is also powerful enough to damage substrates, once the coating has been removed.

Cali Lasers has the solution to the problem. Our pulse-by-pulse lasers use surface color sensing to selectively ablate only a particular color of coating. This unique color-selective closed-loop control differs from the competition's camera based technologies in that our technology performs the surface analysis before firing the laser pulse, not after.

The optical detector in our optical path interrogates the work surface before each laser pulse. It allows the pulse to proceed only if the color to be stripped is still present. When that color is no longer detected, the laser is instantly suppressed. When the moving workhead once again finds that color, the laser is re-enabled.

This unique Cali Lasers feature prevents laser energy from ever striking the substrate, and thus protects the substrate from damage. This feature allows use on delicate materials such as aircraft skins, composites, and metals where surface hardening is unacceptable, such as warship hulls.

Our technologies can be customized for use with any type of laser that utilizes an optical fiber that can transmit invisible and visible light wavelengths in both directions.