Daniel Johannes Förster

Thrust noise minimization in long-term laser ablation of propellant material in the nanosecond and picosecond regime

Abstract. The avoidance of any moving parts in a microthruster exhibits a great potential for low-noise thrust generation in the micronewton range. This is required, e.g., for scientific missions that need attitude and orbit control systems with exquisite precision. Laser ablation propulsion offers the opportunity of permanent inertia-free, electro-optical delivery of laser energy to access the propellant entirely without moving it. New propellant is accessed by ablating the previous surface in layers, essentially damaging the surface with a laser over and over again. The resulting surface properties for different fluences and scanning patterns were investigated for multiple layers of aluminum, copper, and gold. The pulse-length-specific issues of various ablation mechanisms such as vaporization, spallation, and phase explosion are accounted for by the use of a 10-ps laser system and a 500-ps laser system. We show that the surface roughness produced with 500-ps laser pulses is approximately twice the surface roughness generated by using 10-ps laser pulses. Furthermore, with 500-ps pulses, the surface roughness shows low dependency on the fluence for carefully chosen scanning parameters. Therefore, we conclude that laser pulse duration differences in the picosecond and nanosecond regimes will not necessarily alter surface roughness properties.

Molecular Dynamics Simulations of Laser Induced Ablation for Micro Propulsion

A new concept of micro propulsion based upon laser ablation MICROLAS was introduced by the Institute of Technical Physics (ITP) of DLR Stuttgart. Pulsed lasers are used for material removal of a target. The amount of removed material should be variable due to the tunability of input laser energy and repetition rate, resulting in well defined impulse bits and low small thrusts down to the sub-μN scale. We present a modeling approach of laser ablation in order to calculate important figures of merit in aerospace engineering. The program applied is IMD (http://imd.itap.uni-stuttgart.de), an open source molecular dynamics package of the Institute of Functional Materials Quantum Technologies (FMQ). Results are compared with a hydrodynamic code, VLL (http://vll.ihed.ras.ru), as well as with experimental investigations.

Protection performance evaluation regarding imaging sensors hardened against laser dazzling

Electro-optical imaging sensors are widely distributed and used for many different tasks in military operations and civil security. However, their operational capability can be easily disturbed by laser radiation. The likeliness of such an incidence has dramatically increased in the past years due to the free availability of high-power laser pointers. These laser systems, offering laser powers of several watts, pose an increased risk to the human eye as well as to electro-optical sensors. An adequate protection of electro-optical sensors against dazzling is highly desirable. Such protection can be accomplished with different technologies; however, none of the existing technologies can provide a sufficient protection. All current protection measures possess individual advantages and disadvantages. We present the results on the performance of two different protection technologies. The evaluation is based on automatic optical pattern recognition of sensor images taken from a scene containing triangles.

Residual heat during laser ablation of metals with bursts of ultra-short pulses

Abstract The usage of pulse bursts allows increasing the throughput, which still represents a key factor for machining with ultra-short pulsed lasers. The influence of the number of pulses within a burst on the specific removal rate is investigated for copper and stainless steel. Furthermore, calorimetric measurements were performed to estimate the residual energy coefficient as well as the absorptance of machined surfaces for copper to explain the reduced specific removal rate for a 2-pulse burst and the similar or even higher rate for a 3-pulse burst compared to single pulse ablation. Based on the measurements, a description of the process using single pulses and pulse bursts with up to three pulses is presented.

Residual heat generated during laser processing of CFRP with picosecond laser pulses

Abstract One of the major reasons for the formation of a heat-affected zone during laser processing of carbon fiber-reinforced plastics (CFRP) with repetitive picosecond (ps) laser pulses is heat accumulation. A fraction of every laser pulse is left as what we termed residual heat in the material also after the completed ablation process and leads to a gradual temperature increase in the processed workpiece. If the time between two consecutive pulses is too short to allow for a sufficient cooling of the material in the interaction zone, the resulting temperature can finally exceed a critical temperature and lead to the formation of a heat-affected zone. This accumulation effect depends on the amount of energy per laser pulse that is left in the material as residual heat. Which fraction of the incident pulse energy is left as residual heat in the workpiece depends on the laser and process parameters, the material properties, and the geometry of the interaction zone, but the influence of the individual quantities at the present state of knowledge is not known precisely due to the lack of comprehensive theoretical models. With the present study, we, therefore, experimentally determined the amount of residual heat by means of calorimetry. We investigated the dependence of the residual heat on the fluence, the pulse overlap, and the depth of laser-generated grooves in CRFP. As expected, the residual heat was found to increase with increasing groove depth. This increase occurs due to an indirect heating of the kerf walls by the ablation plasma and the change in the absorbed laser fluence caused by the altered geometry of the generated structures.

Power Spectral Density Evaluation of Laser Milled Surfaces

Ablating surfaces with a pulsed laser system in milling processes often leads to surface changes depending on the milling depth. Especially if a constant surface roughness and evenness is essential to the process, structural degradation may advance until the process fails. The process investigated is the generation of precise thrust by laser ablation. Here, it is essential to predict or rather control the evolution of the surfaces roughness. Laser ablative milling with a short pulse laser system in vacuum (≈1 Pa) were performed over depths of several 10 µm documenting the evolution of surface roughness and unevenness with a white light interference microscope. Power spectral density analysis of the generated surface data reveals a strong influence of the crystalline structure of the solid. Furthermore, it was possible to demonstrate that this effect could be suppressed for gold.