Ablation of Molybdenum by Femtosecond Laser Pulse Using the Two-Temperature Model

Abstract

The study generally presents the mechanism of ablation of metals by ultrafast laser pulses; the main part was devoted to understanding a particularly interesting case: femtosecond pulse laser irradiation.

Femtosecond ablation heating is described by a two-temperature model based on the Fourier heat transfer equation. This model consists of two parabolic differential equations coupled by the exchange term between the two subsystems, namely the electron gas and the ion network.

The ultra-rapid heating mechanisms in metallic material have been studied by an approach based on numerical simulation, where the study of ultra-short pulse heating has been carried out on a Molybdenum slide.

The work carried out consists in the construction of a geometry representing the domain of computation, thanks to the Gambit preprocessor, then to solve the equations coupled by the Fluent processor. The results obtained concerning the distribution of the temperature field show conformity with those obtained by other authors.

The applications that can be envisaged with a laser with femtosecond pulses fired at a given frequency (a few MHz) open the way to nonmetric structuring which can be applied to advanced techniques for the exploitation of solar energy for example