Construction of a rapid simulation design tool for thermal responses to laser-induced feature patterns.

There are many emerging manufacturing processes whereby surface structures are processed by spatially laser patterning of an entire feature at a time, as opposed to rastering a small beam. It is important to ascertain and ideally control the induced thermal fields underneath the pattern. This paper develops a computational framework to rapidly evaluate the induced thermal fields due to application of a laser on the surface. The aggregate thermal fields are efficiently computed by superposing individual “beamlet” heat-kernel solutions, based on Green’s functions, to form complex surface patterns. The utility of the approach is that laser-process designers can efficiently compute the results of selecting various system parameters, such as spatially-variable laser intensity within a pattern. This allows one to rapidly compute system parameter studies needed in the manufacturing of new products. Included are:A computational framework to compute the time-transient thermal response from a spatio-temporally non-uniform laser beam in an arbitrary spatial pattern andAn analysis of how the results can be used to track the evolution of the thermal gradients and their correlation to thermal stresses. Three-dimensional examples are provided to illustrate the technique. The utility of the approach is that an analyst can efficiently ascertain a large number of laser-input scenarios without resorting to computationally-intensive numerical procedures, such the Finite Element Method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]