Can PP plastic be welded with laser? What is the welding effect?

PP material (polypropylene) is a very common plastic in our lives. It has high impact resistance, mechanical strength and good corrosion resistance, such as resistance to various organic solvents and acid-base corrosive liquids. It is widely used in household appliance insulation shells, culture bottles, food bags, beverage packaging bottles and other products.

Generally speaking, in order to save production costs and improve production efficiency, enterprises need to inject plastics into simple structural components, and then assemble them into the required components through mechanical riveting, bonding or welding. Among them, welding is a combination of material molecules, with high joint strength and long aging life. Commonly used plastic welding technologies mainly include hot plate welding, ultrasonic welding, etc. Hot plate plastic welding can easily cause damage to the product surface. Due to the large heat input, plastic welding is easy to degrade and reduce the welding shear strength. Ultrasonic plastic welding generates heat, and welding plastics is easy to produce fragments, which affects the welding shear strength and causes vibration damage to the electronic components around the welding. With the development of laser technology, laser welding technology will gradually be applied to plastic production. The laser heat input is more concentrated, and the overall heat input is relatively small, avoiding the problem of hot plate welding. The laser does not contact the product, and it can also avoid the problem of ultrasonic welding. It is particularly suitable for the welding of small precision plastic structures.

The principle of plastic laser welding is that the laser absorbs the laser energy through the upper and lower materials to generate heat. So far, the research on plastic laser welding has mainly focused on black plastic, black plastic, white plastic and black plastic, transparent colored plastic, etc., while the research on transparent plastic is relatively less.

Laser welding effectively reduces the undesirable damage of PP materials to the internal electronic components of the product during vibration welding. Laser welding has the characteristics of wide applicability, high flexibility, high welding strength, and beautiful product welding. The application of laser welding PP materials can make up for the shortcomings of traditional plastic connection methods.