Could your company benefit from laser marking?
Laser marking provides a lot more than just a means of identifying the brand of a certain piece of equipment. Laser marking can actually increase the perceived value of your product by adding decorative features like the company logo, or even by modifying the surface appearance of the item to make it more eye-catching.
Why is this important?
Including the logo or signature of your company can increase your own market appeal by getting your image out there in a recognizable way. Product marking enables your product—and your company—to be recognizable, making it much more marketable and giving it a much greater advantage amongst your competitors. Laser marking can also increase your business’s security by ensuring your name stays on the items you manufacture, decreasing the risk of product theft.
So you’ve decided to give product marking a go—but which laser marking technology should you go with? Fiber laser marking or CO2 laser marking?
The advantages of CO2 laser marking
CO2 laser marking is one of the more commonly used forms of laser marking due to their high efficiency and beam quality. It is also suited for a wide variety of Non-metallic materials, including wood, acrylic, glass, textiles, plastic, foils and film, leather, and even stone. CO2 laser marking is largely used in food, drug, or alcohol packaging, electronic components, integrated circuits, electrical appliances, mobile communications, building materials, and PVC pipes, to name a few. CO2 lasers are gas lasers. They electronically stimulate a carbon dioxide gas mixture to leave a permanent mark on the surface. This technique enables the engraving of elaborate designs, logos, dates, or text onto the surface of the product.
The advantages of fiber laser marking
Fiber lasers are a form of solid state laser. The process is enacted through the seed laser, which generates a laser beam that is then amplified using specially designed glass fibers. These are supplied with energy using pump diodes. Fiber lasers can produce an intense laser mark with an extremely small focal diameter, making the intensity up to 100 times higher than that of the CO2 laser. This makes fiber laser marking well-suited for metal engraving (including coated metals) and high-contrast plastic markings. The small focal diameter also means fiber laser marking is suited for its provision of aptness and fine detail. It is widely used for product traceability and identification, enabling the permanent marking of bar codes and serial numbers, as well as 2D matrix and graphics, onto ceramics, metals, and plastics etc.
Both fiber and CO2 laser marking provide high-quality engraving that can be suitable for a number of product marking purposes. From product tracking and product identification to creating a recognizably marketable look for your product, laser marking is the answer for you. Your project (or product), however, may be better suited to one form of laser marking over the other based on your particular needs. To find out more about which method of laser marking would be best for your project, visit us at HeatSign today.