Tailoring optical properties of surfaces in wide spectral ranges by multi-scale femtosecond-laser texturing: A case-study for TaB2 ceramics

Abstract

The use of high power pulsed lasers is an effective tool for microstructuring material surfaces. It appears particularly useful when the material has some characteristics making difficult using other procedures (e.g. a high hardness). The present work reports on the femtosecond-laser treatment on tantalum diboride ultra-high temperature ceramics with different starting porosity fractions. The interaction with the laser beam creates a pattern with a complex multi-scale structure on the ceramic surface, whose characteristics depend on accumulated laser fluence and pristine porosity. Optical properties are significantly changed, allowing to separately optimize the interaction of the material with electromagnetic radiation spectrally located in different regions. As a case study, we apply the proposed strategy considering high-temperature solar thermal absorber applications, where the independent management of UV–Visible-Near IR radiation (sunlight) and Mid-IR (thermal radiation at the operating temperatures) are required. The correlation between the typical sizes of the realized multi-scale structures and the optical parameters (solar absorptance and thermal emittance in our example application) is discussed using an original predictive approach. The method here shown can be extended to every situation where materials are required to simultaneously interact with electromagnetic radiation in various spectral ranges. • Femtosecond laser-treatment creates a multi-scale surface pattern on ultra-hard TaB2 ceramics. • Local surface morphology and composition rely on accumulated laser fluence and pristine material porosity. • Optical properties are changed, with a remarkable increase of solar absorbance. • An original and simple method is described to correlate optical properties to the multi-scale surface characteristics. • The method is extremely useful to predictably optimize any surface interacting with light.