Marking of plastic and glass products with ultraviolet lasers

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Manufacturers of medical disposables and packaging, pharmaceutical containers and a range of plastic and glass consumer products need to permanently mark their products, e.g. for traceability, anti-counterfeiting, labelling or functional purposes such as scale marking. Labels can become damaged or peel off, inks can rub off or contaminate the product, and infrared lasers can cause charring of the product surface or other undesirable thermal effects. So how do you label products?

Solutions

Ultraviolet lasers are ideal for most of these marking tasks because the high-energy photons from these lasers directly break the molecular bonds in plastic polymers. This can induce a photochemical transformation that changes the colour of the plastic without removing material or causing thermal damage to the surface.

The most common photochemical transformation is the bleaching of the coloured material, leaving a light trace. Some materials are designed to induce other types of colour changes. For example, ultraviolet lasers can create dark, high-contrast marks on nylon and polyurethane, that are white due to the doping of the material with titanium dioxide, as in nylon circuit breakers for residential use. Ultraviolet lasers can also mark clear and coated colored plastics and perform cold engraving on coated and uncoated glass. In the pharmaceutical industry, UV laser marking is also useful for marking gel capsules and blister packs or for creating QR codes on bottle caps.

Coherent is a world leader in pulsed ultraviolet lasers for marking and other industrial applications. Our decades of experience in ultraviolet applications have produced lasers with the highest reliability and longest lifetime, such as the PowerLine E 8 QT.

Benefits

Ultraviolet laser marking meets the broad need for cold marking of plastic parts and packaging, e.g. without the formation of a heat affected zone (HAZ) or other thermal damage. Coherent laser markers provide you with proven ultraviolet marking solutions from an experienced supplier who can also simplify any mandatory certification processes.