Minimise the Cost of your Laser Assist Cutting Gas

If you’re thinking about how to improve your efficiency and lower your costs in 2021, you’re not alone. After a difficult year, most businesses in the manufacturing sector are looking at opportunities to make savings.

One area worth considering is your choice of laser assist cutting gases supply. In this blog, we look at optimising your supply, with tips to ensure it is fit for purpose, and ideas to minimise wastage and downtime.

If your nitrogen requirements are modest, manifold cylinder pallets are a good, flexible option.

However, if your usage is more significant or growing, a liquid supply is hard to beat. Providing a continuous, high flow rate from a bulk vessel, it’s a simple, reliable and efficient supply mode. Most importantly it’s incredibly easy to keep track of your costs – you pay a defined monthly sum for the rental of your bulk vessel and then a variable cost for your gas deliveries.

Vessels are available in a range of sizes to suit your cutting requirements and are enormously flexible; matching your needs today, but also offering the capacity for future growth. For example BOC’s range of vessels can also incorporate telemetry, automatically measuring your usage and notifying us when you need a refill, so you can remain topped up, even when you’re running additional shifts or taking on new work.

You’ll already know that laser cutting is a high added-value process and the cost of downtime is almost unthinkable; potentially adding up to thousands of pounds in lost revenue (not to mention the stress of rescheduling and recontracting work.).

That’s why it’s critical that the risk of failure in your machine consumables – your material, cooling water, electricity or cutting assist gases – is minimised.

You may already be using an on-site nitrogen generator, or be thinking of switching to one. They can certainly be a viable option for businesses that don’t require high purity nitrogen, and whose nitrogen consumption remains reasonably constant.

However, on-site generators are complex machines, combining an air compressor, a molecular sieve container, a nitrogen booster compressor and a high-pressure nitrogen storage bank. If any one of these elements goes down, your production output will be affected. This isn’t a problem for businesses that can tolerate interruptions to their cutting schedules (they might switch to oxygen – although this is a slower cutting process), but for most, the potential downtime could be a big problem.

It’s important that your gases supplier provides regular gas reviews and technical support you need to ensure you are receiving the best supply option for your business and are operating as efficiently as possible.

BOC’s liquid nitrogen offers a constant high purity of 99.998% and is available in a variety of supply options, from a range of bulk vessel sizes to smaller Cryospeed^® vessels. We provide every customer with regular gases reviews and our industry experts in laser cutting assist gases are always on hand to help.