Like rice and oil, face mask has become a necessity in our daily life. However, some bad sellers recycle the used face masks and sell them directly to the consumers without even sanitizing them in order to get the huge profit. Fake face masks are not able to protect us from the virus. What’s more, they are harmful to human body. To identify the real face masks, the most direct ways are to check the laser marked anti-counterfeit labels on the packages or on the face masks themselves.
The real face mask has a laser marked label and that label can indicate different color seeing from different angles. However, the fake one doesn’t have the color change and it is printed by inkjet printing.
In fact, laser marking technique can not only be used to identify the real face mask, it can also be used to identify the authenticity in food, medicine, tobacco, electronics and cosmetics. So why it is so powerful in anti-counterfeiting in different industries?
Well, first, let’s take a look at the working principle of laser marking machine. Laser marking machine uses high energy and high density laser beam on the material surface. The focused light beam will make the material surface vaporize or change its color and its route can be easily controlled. And that’s how the eternal markings are made. Laser marking machines can print out different words, symbols and patterns which can be millimeter or micrometer level.
Before laser marking machines are used widely, the markings on the packages are often printed by ink printing. Markings by ink printing are easy to be removed or altered and disappear as time goes by. What’s more, ink is a consumable, which increases the operation cost and causes pollution to the environment.
Take the food package as an example. Since the markings printed by ink printing are easy to be removed and altered, some bad sellers altered the production date or the brand names of the food and sell them to the consumers. And that is intolerable.
The advent of laser marking machine helps solve the problem of ink printing. Using laser marking machine on the food package is more efficient, more environmental friendly, more clear and more lasting. Besides, the laser mark labels can be connected to the database in the computer so that each of the procedure can be tracked efficiently.
As we all know, laser sources have a wide variety and different laser sources have different applicable materials. For example, fiber lasers are more suitable on different kinds of metal materials; CO2 lasers are more suitable on non-metal materials; UV lasers can work on both metal and non-metal materials but in higher precision and more demanding applications.
In fact, CO2 lasers and fiber lasers have long been found to perform laser marking. These two types of laser sources produce light in infrared wavelength. The marking processing is in fact heating up he materials so that the material surfaces will carbonize, bleach or ablate to indicate different color comparison. However, this kind of heating up will damage the surface of the package, especially the plastic package in food industry, CO2 laser marking machine and fiber laser marking machine are not widely used in food package.
In this circumstance, the advantage of UV laser is more obvious. Most of the materials can better absorb ultraviolet light than infrared light and the photon energy of UV laser is much higher. When UV laser is working on the high-molecular polymer, it can break the chemical bond of the material and then the broken material surface will vaporize to realize the ablation. In this process, the heat-affecting zone is pretty small and very few energy turns into heat energy. Therefore, it is less harmful to the material than CO2 laser and fiber laser. And that’s why UV laser marking machine is more popular in food and medical industry.
As mentioned earlier, UV laser is more suitable for higher precision and more demanding applications. In fact, it is also quite sensitive to to the thermal change. And in order to keep the UV laser at a stable temperature range, it must be equipped with a laser water cooler. S&A Teyu CWUL series and CWUP series laser water coolers are the ideal options. They offer ultra-precise temperature control of ±0.2℃ ~±0.1℃, showing great ability of controlling temperature. Besides, they all have small size and light weight, so you can carry them wherever you want. Find out how our laser water chillers help your UV laser marking business at https://www.teyuchiller.com/ultrafast-laser-uv-laser-chiller_c3
