Since its first development, laser colouring has been considered a potential candidate to replace traditional marking and colouring methods required in many different industrial applications due to its flexibility, offering the possibility of colouring different geometries with high resolution due to laser spot sizes typically in the order of tens of microns, being environmentally friendly, where no toxic chemicals or dyes are required, and being a single step process allowing a large-scale high productivity with a reduced environmental impact.

Laser colouring by oxidation being restricted to certain materials such as stainless steel or titanium, we have developed a novel approach to colour metallic substrates exploiting plasmonic effects, where the light interacts with nanostructures generated by ultrafast laser pulses to result in colour generation.

In this work, we focus on research of laser parameters such as energy per pulse, frequency, scanning speed, pitch distance, number of burst per pulse or pulse duration and their optimization to obtain a permanent wide spectrum of angle independent colours in different materials such as aluminium, copper or titanium.

Additionally, we will present an industrial laser platform able to showcase both colouring approaches, oxidation and plasmonic effects, allowing an accurate generation of complex 2D and 3D designs.