This dark mark needs not only to be legible without deforming the surface of the metal but also able to stand up to the passivation, or sterilization, processes used with multi-use medical products. “What we’ve seen in the past is a situation
where a device is marked successfully and has resisted corrosion and all is well—and then some new variable is intro- duced,” Hoult said. “In one case the pas- sivation bath condi- tions changed, leading to a reduction in the corrosion resistance of the laser marks—and fl aking occurred.” Boyle at Amada
Miyachi America is familiar with this challenge as well. “Recently we’ve been developing passivation-resistant marks with our fi ber laser markers. It’s a newer, very sensitive technique,” he said. “We’ll test the mark with a bath of nitric acid that cleans off all of the germs and de- bris on the part, and see that the mark survives intact. It’s a very aggres- sive test because the acid is basically eating away at the metal at some levels. We’ve proven that we can keep the mark on and now we’re implementing the technique at a couple of customer sites. It’s a recent development.”
Fiber Laser Advantages The industry-wide acceptance of the fi ber laser
goes beyond its having a lower price point. It has numerous advantages over earlier systems such as CO2
and YAG (yttrium aluminum garnet) sourced lasers because a lot of complexities have been removed. YAG lasers, for example, used to be driven with a fl ash lamp in order to get the high-intensity light needed to get the energy propagated through
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the YAG crystal. Flash lamps were water-cooled, required a lot of service, and were very expensive, explained Epilog’s Henry. Enter fi ber. “Fiber lasers were born out of fi ber optics use in the communications industry. Some very smart scientists and engineers discovered that they could dope these optical cables with different rare ele- ments and get different wavelengths of light to propagate through and off of them. Instead of using fl ash lamp light, they use diode light,” Henry said. “The fi ber lasers are air-cooled— you don’t need a watercooling device; they’re very compact, so they’re very easy to integrate into our systems; and they’re incredibly robust. They just work.” IPG’s Hoult added,
The Schmidt Alpha Laser Enclosure. Photo courtesy Schmidt Marking Systems
“To say that fi ber lasers have turned the industry upside down—that wouldn’t be overstating it. IPG introduced the fi rst nanosecond-pulsed low-power laser for
marking. And I think now everybody who manufac- tures laser marking systems has a fi ber laser version in their inventory. “The main reason people like the fi ber laser—and
I’ve heard this time and again—is we ship them out to the customer, they plug them in, clamp up the op- tic, push the button, and it works,” Hoult continued. Fiber lasers are also simpler overall. “With fi ber laser, there’s no free-space optics
anywhere in the device—no fl ash lamp. Your energy source, a diode laser, is fi ber-coupled. Instead of a bunch of optic components arranged and tweaked, you simply have to splice fi bers together. That means the whole thing is far more rugged and maintenance-free. The diodes last for many tens of thousands of hours. The diodes we use are called
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