On experimental and numerical study of the dynamics of a liquid metal jet hit by a laser pulse

Abstract

In this paper, we present an experimental and numerical study of the laser pulse impact on the liquid metal jet target. The jet motion was recorded with the stroboscopic ultrafast shadow photography. Simulations were carried out in a two-step approach. At the first step, we simulated laser interaction with the target using the radiation hydrodynamics code 3DLINE, which accounts for a number of effects: liquid–gas phase transition, dynamics of ionization, radiation transfer, laser reflection, refraction and absorption. However, this code cannot be used on a deeply refined mesh near the liquid surface and does not account for the surface tension, which strongly affects liquid motion on the microsecond timescale after the laser pulse ends. Therefore, for the second step we employed the OpenFOAM solver, based on the volume-of-fluid method, which overcomes these limitations. The simulated target dynamics is found to be in a fairly good agreement with the experiment.