Author: Omid A. RanjbarPublisher:
ISBN:
Category : Electronic dissertations
Languages : en
Pages :
Book Description
Ablation of materials by nanosecond laser pulses involves expansion of a laser-induced vapor plume into a background gas. The absorption of the incident laser radiation by the plume can substantially decrease the amount of laser energy absorbed directly by the target, and, correspondingly, the amount of the ablated material. This plasma shielding effect limits the overall efficiency of industrial laser systems designed for material removal applications. The goal of the present work is to numerically study the expansion process of plumes induced by irradiation of a metal target by bursts or groups of nanosecond laser pulses and to reveal the implications of the interaction between plumes induced by individual pulses for the efficiency of material removal. The plume expansion induced by irradiation of a copper target in argon background gas is studied based on one- and two-dimensional hybrid computational models that include a hydrodynamic or kinetic model of plasma plumes. The hydrodynamic model is based on finite-difference solution of gas dynamics equations. The kinetic model is implemented in the form of the direct simulation Monte Carlo (DSMC) method. In this work, the generalization of the DSMC method for plasma flows is developed. The effects of laser fluence, spot size, inter-pulse separation, and background gas pressure are thoroughly studied. The numerical simulations of plume expansion induced by a burst of pulses indicate the formation of complicated flow structures with cascades of the primary and secondary shock waves and strong interaction between plumes induced by individual pulses. The simulations reveal the plume accumulation effect when the plumes induced by preceding pulses in a burst change conditions of propagation of plumes generated by subsequent pulses. The degree of plasma shielding increases with increasing number of laser pulses due to the plume accumulation effect. It results in reduction of the effectiveness of material removal by the subsequent pulses. The degrees of the plasma shielding and plume accumulation effects strongly depend on the inter-pulse separation and laser spot size. The trade-off between the plume accumulation and thermal accumulation effects maximizes the ablation depth per pulse at a certain value of the time delay between pulses.
