In recent years, the demand for highly integrated and lightweight components has been rising sharply, especially in plastics processing. One strategy for weight-saving solutions is the development of conductive tracks and layouts directly on the polymer housing parts in order to be able to dispense with the system integration of additional printed circuit boards (PCB). This can be conducted very advantageously and flexibly with laser-based processes for functionalizing polymer surfaces. In this work, a three-step laser-based process for subsequent selective metallization is presented. Conventional injection molded components without special additives serve as the initial substrate. The Laser-Based Selective Activation (LSA) uses picosecond laser pulses to activate the plastic surface to subsequently deposit palladium. The focus is on determining the amount of deposited palladium in correlation to the laser and scan parameters. For the first time, the dependence of the metallization result on the accumulated laser fluence (F_acc) is described. The treated polymer parts are characterized using optical and scanning electron microscopy as well as a contact-type profilometer.

In optical manufacturing, the depth of subsurface damages (SSD) depicts an important quality aspect of optical elements. Nowadays, the investigation methods of the damage zone are mostly destructive and allow a sampling of the substrates only. This leads to a lack of statistical reliability. In this paper, one aim is to develop an easy and cheap procedure to evaluate the probes. Therefore, a spherical polishing and chemical etching is introduced. By means of imaging processing software the acquired data is analysed, which eliminates the operator influence und increases the reproducibility. Applying binarizing and shape detection algorithms the SSD structures is detected and the number of pixels per structure is calculated. The percentage of SSD over the depth fit with an exponential curve displays a maximum depth as a single value. The development of a method to choose the best threshold value represents an approach to quantify the uncertainty of the resulting SSD-depth.