Numerical investigation on machining glass with CO2 lasers.

When a glass substrate was irradiated by three different temporal shapes of laser sources, namely, linetime-shape laser, triangle-time-shape laser, and parabolatime-shape laser, the mathematical models were proposed, and the temperature distribution and the resulting thermal stress were calculated by the finite-element-method (FEM) software ANSYS. With these three types of lasers having the same output laser energy, the resulting thermal stress induced in the glass substrate was analyzed. The results showed that, with the same output laser energy, the thermal stress produced in glass heated by line-time-shape laser is higher than that produced in glass heated by the other two shapes of lasers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]