Short-pulse Laser Processing of CFRP

Abstract

Short-pulse lasers allow processing of carbon fiber reinforced plastics (CFRP) with very high quality, i.e. showing thermal damage in the range of only a few micrometers. Due to the usually high intensities and the short interaction times of such short pulses, only a small fraction of the incident laser energy is converted to residual heat which does not contribute to the ablation process. However, if the next pulse arrives before the material had time to cool down, i.e. this residual thermal energy did not sufficiently flow out of the interaction region, it encounters material which is still hot. This remaining energy and temperature is summing up during the sequence of pulses and is commonly referred to as “heat accumulation”. Thermal damage in addition to the damage created by the process itself is induced, if the resulting temperature sum exceeds the damage temperatures of either the fibre or the plastic. The current paper presents the influence of the laser parameters such as pulse energy and repetition rate on this heat accumulation. An analytical model was used to describe the heat accumulation for different laser parameters. It describes the heat accumulation process and allows estimating the maximum number of pulses allowed at the same place before a detrimental temperature increase occurs.