marking and engraving plastic

Most people who have been in the industry for a while know that a fiber laser can mark bare metal, which is something that a CO2 laser can’t do. But did you know that a fiber laser can mark plastic too? Well, certain kinds of plastic that is.

Rowmark LLC, Findlay, OH, has introduced a new plastic material that is designed specifically for fiber lasering. I’ll take a look at this new material in this article, and also talk about other plastics that can be marked with a fiber laser.

Before I review Rowmark’s new material, we need a quick physics lesson about why a fiber laser, more specifically a “solid state pulsed ytterbium fiber laser,” will mark metal and some plastics while a CO2 laser will mark most plastics but not metal that doesn’t have some kind of coating on it. Fiber lasers and YAG lasers are often thought to be the same. They are not, but the frequency produced by these two types of lasers is close enough that they can mark many of the same materials.

FiberGrave allows lasering a respectable image even with a poor quality photo. This image is a photograph of a newspaper photograph that was photocopied and then engraved on FiberGrave.

To keep it in terms I can understand, the difference between a fiber laser and a CO2 laser is in the frequency of the laser beam being generated. Granted, the two laser beams are generated in totally different ways (one is done with a CO2 gas-filled tube while the other is done totally with solid state electronics) but the end result is a difference in light frequency, or wavelength.

As you know, all light (visible and invisible) can be measured in frequency. Ultraviolet light, for instance, is so high on the spectrum the human eye can’t see it while sunlight and a variety of artificial types of light are in a very narrow range of frequencies that we can see.

What this boils down to is the frequency of a fiber laser won’t have much effect on the engraving plastics we are familiar with.

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