The technique

The idea behind laser beam melt ablation is quite simple. A high energy laser (mostly CO2) melts a small track on the workpiece, which is then driven out with the impulse of a gas jet. If one does this for many neighbouring tracks, one gets a whole lowered area in the workpiece. This technique can be used to replace for example conventional milling tools. The advantages are obvious: no toolwear exists, extremely hard or brittle materials can be processed and the damage of the device due to bad workpieces can be excluded. Unfortunately the process is rather difficult to control as the interactions between the system components are very complicated. Nowadays the surface quality of the processed materials declines with the feed rate of the laser beam, so that the method is too slow for industrial applications. Enlargement of processed surface.

Theoretical investigation

Here in Oldenburg, we are doing the theoretical part of the work. This includes

• Nonlinear time series analysis
• Wavelet analysis
• Superstatistics
• Development of a stochastic process description

Project group

This is a cooperation project with the universities of Erlangen and Potsdam. Kevin Bube (Oldenburg)
Camilo Rodrigues Neto (Oldenburg)
Adrienn Cser (Erlangen)
Reik Donner (Potsdam)