A Steady State Semi-analytical Approximation of Melt Pool Evolution in Pulsed Laser Surface Melting

Abstract

Pulsed laser surface melting (pLSM) is a technique that offers efficient and effective way to modify the geometry surfaces without any addition or removal of material. The resultant surface geometry plays a critical role in several applications. Thispaper presents a steady state thin film approximation of the meltpool created by pLSM and the resulting semi-analytical solution for the evolved surface geometry.This predictions of the semi-analytical solution are then compare with a validated numerical solution. The comparison demonstrate a good match with errors ranging from ~4% to ~25%across several pulse duration. Larger errors are observed at comparatively lower and higher pulse duration,and smaller errors are observed for intermediate pulse duration values.Overall, the thin film solution is a reasonable and useful approximation of the of the evolved surface geometry through pLSM process, thus saving significant computational costs.