Laser Marking Painted Stainless Steel

Thin walled stainless steel buckets with painted or powder-coated exteriors are often sold as ice buckets for use as kitchenware or barware. While direct stainless steel marking typically requires a high-power CO2 laser of at least 60 W to 100 W, paint ablation can be done with powers as low as 25 W. This exposes the stainless steel underneath creating great contrast with the surrounding painted surface.

For this application, a painted ice bucket was marked with a large Synrad company logo. The marking setup consisted of an FH Flyer marking head and a 25 W laser controlled by our WinMark Pro laser marking software. The Flyer head was equipped with a 370 mm focal length lens that provided a 540 um (0.021”) spot size. This large focal length lens was needed for its large mark field and the 370 mm len’s deep depth of focus ensured that the mark stayed in focus along the slight curvature of the marking surface.

The mark object consisted of a bitmap graphic with dimensions of 156 mm x 79 mm (6.15”x3.1”) imported into WinMark Pro.

The Resolution property was set to 200 lines per inch, the Power property was set to a duty cycle equivalent to 25 W, and the mark Velocity was set to 635 millimeters per second (25 ips). The resulting mark exposed the steel underneath creating a high-contrast shiny mark and was completed in a total cycle-time of 50.8 seconds.   

Laser Cutting Vacuum Pump Diaphragms

Plastic or rubber diaphragms are important components in positive-displacement vacuum pumps. Because the diaphragm must form an air-tight seal between the pump's inner and outer chambers to create an efficient pumping process, the edges of the diaphragm must have very good quality with no roughness or unevenness. Laser cutting these materials provides excellent repeatable edge quality while reducing the possibility of diaphragm damage caused by mechanical cutting.

For this particular application, the requirement was to cut a center mounting hole in 1 mm (0.039”) thick diaphragms made of layered neoprene and PTFE (Teflon®). The required hole size measured 22.9 mm (0.9”) in diameter.

The cutting process used a Synrad 80 W laser in conjunction with an XY table and a cutting head outfitted with a 2.5” focal length lens that provided a 0.1 mm (0.004”) focused spot size. CDA (clean, dry air) was used as an assist gas at 10 PSI through a 0.9 mm (0.035”) wide nozzle to minimize melting of the material and to protect the focusing lens. With this setup, the material was cut at a velocity of 74 millimeters per second (175 inches/minute). The resulting neoprene and PTFE cut edges were smooth with little melting.

Laser World of Photonics Munich

Visit us at Laser World of Photonics, Munich, May 23rd -26th, booth #C2 - 410.

Synrad Laser Manuals Now on CD

Beginning this month, we are eliminating the paper manuals in our laser ship kits and replacing them with a single CD, the Synrad CO2 Laser Manuals CD, that contains all of our laser manuals in PDF format. This change will occur over the next several months as we deplete our existing stock of manuals. Adobe Reader, which is a free download, is required to view PDF documents.