Computer modelling of the laser ablation of polymers

Abstract

Laser ablation of polymers has been the subject of extensive studies for nearly three decades. Results of these investigations have shown that thermal effects play an important role during frequency tripled nanosecond Nd:YAG laser ablation of polyimide. Despite of the studies, effect of these processes has not been satisfactorily clarified. Thermal effects, photochemical and other phenomena still exist and so the thermal modelling of laser ablation is a very specialised problem. The investigation in this paper deals with special conditions in thermal models, which highly differ from more common conditions. Although there are numerous excellent thermal modelling software available, mainly in the field of electronics technology, these are not suitable or ready for handling special conditions, for example the removing of material from the domain under investigation, which is one of the most important areas. Hence we decided to develop a special thermal modelling tool. The model designing aspects which define the development process are presented in this paper.

Lasers Based Manufacturing

“…These models invariably assume the ablation to be either photochemical or photo-thermal process. Researchers have also studied (Issa et al 2008;Sinkovics et al 2010) a thermal model based on transient heat conduction model, using finite element methods by irradiating CO 2 laser to create micro channels on the surface of soda-lime glass. In photo-thermal process, the deposited energy is converted to heat, leading to thermal decomposition.…”

Modeling of nanosecond pulsed laser processing of polymers in air and water

“…There exist several models of laser heating of polymers in air. These include photo-thermal models [10][11][12][13][14] for higher wavelength radiation (such as for infrared (IR) lasers) using the finite element method [15,16] and finite volume method [17]. The modeling is based on solving the heat conduction equation with a volumetric heat source representing the laser heating.…”

“…The photo-chemical models are based on the chemical kinetics of bond dissociation and are coupled with the photo-thermal model accounting for the material decomposition. Some of these models also account for the dynamic attenuation of radiation by the expanding plasma plume [17,21]. Apart from these, molecular dynamics is also widely used to simulate laser ablation of polymers [25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33].…”

Experimental investigation and numerical simulation on continuous wave laser ablation of multilayer carbon fiber composite

“…[16][17][18][19] Cheng et al 20 developed a three-dimensional finite element model to simulate the transient temperature field and the hole dimension in the laser drilling of carbon fiber composites, and good agreement with his experiment was observed. Sinkovics et al 21 developed a Matlab-based finite element tool for the model of laser ablation of polymers based on thermal cell method. Molecular dynamics (MD) simulations of the interaction on laser with polymeric materials have also been developed recently.…”

“…Sinkovics et al. 21 developed a Matlab-based finite element tool for the model of laser ablation of polymers based on thermal cell method. Molecular dynamics (MD) simulations of the interaction on laser with polymeric materials have also been developed recently.…”