Stents

One of the most frequent causes of acute heart failure is vasoconstriction. To guard against this, angioplastic surgery is carried out to implant so-called stents. Stents are supportive implants, cut from a tube, and place unique requirements on quality.

The material used may be stainless steel, or nickel-titanium alloys (shape memory alloys). The typical tube diameters are between 1 and 10 mm, with a wall thickness of approx. 100 µm.

With StarCut Stent laser systems, burr-free cuts finer than 20 µm can be achieved. Cutting speeds of several mm per second are possible. Typically, in the manufacture of stents 1 cm long, laser cuts up to 40 cm length are necessary.