The role of radiation transport in the thermal response of semitransparent materials to localized laser heating

Abstract

Lasers are widely used to modify the internal structure of semitransparent materials for a wide variety of applications, including waveguide fabrication and laser glass damage healing. The gray diffusion approximation used in past models to describe radiation cooling is not adequate for these materials, particularly near the heated surface layer. In this paper we describe a computational model based upon solving the radiation transport equation in 1D by the Pn method with ∼500 photon energy bands, and by multi-group radiation diffusion in 2D with fourteen photon energy bands. The model accounts for the temperature-dependent absorption of infrared laser light and subsequent redistribution of the deposited heat by both radiation and conductive transport. We present representative results for fused silica irradiated with 2–12 W of 4.6 or 10.6 µm laser light for 5–10 s pulse durations in a 1 mm spot, which is small compared to the diameter and thickness of the silica slab. We show that, unlike the case for bulk heating, in localized infrared laser heating radiation transport plays only a very small role in the thermal response of silica.