Marking lasers are usually hefty machines that take up several square feet of space on the production line and more behind it for cooling lines, pumps, and heat exchangers. A recent design however, the ProWriter F20, needs only 18 × 12 × 24-in., runs more efficiently than traditional units, needs only air cooling, and still marks characters as small as 0.003-in. The laser system from Baublys Control Laser, Orlando, Fla. (controllaser.com) is the Medical Design Machine of the Month because of its marking capability, lower cost than other laser markers, and a laser life of about 100,000 hours.

Traditional-marking lasers use YAG (yttrium aluminum garnet) rods and are usually lamp pumped (bright white light used to excite photons in the YAG rod). But lamp life is usually less than 800 hrs and the marker system needs water-cooling accessories. A variation on this design uses smaller diode laser packs to pump the crystal. But diode life is only 10,000 hr at most and it costs upward of $20,000 to replace the diode packs. And both of these designs have mirrors to align.

The F20, however, is a fiber laser. “It has a series of small diode lasers connected to a fiber-optic bundle,” says Glenn Prentice, product manager with Baublys. The unit plugs into a 115-V outlet and consumes less then 10% of the energy of lamp-pumped systems, he adds. “What's more, there are no mirrors to align or optics to burn out, so it's almost maintenance free,” says Prentice.

The F20 makes a variety of marks on metals, plastic, anodized aluminum, and other materials. It's based on a 20-W fiber laser operating at a wavelength of 1,060 nm.