Surface treatment with GHz-bursts

We compare conventional bursts with GHz bursts in respect of their applicability for surface treatments such as polishing, hardening or surface alloying. It turns out that GHz bursts are more suitable than conventional bursts, especially with respect of energy efficiency and thus for gentle surface treatments with less thermal load for the bulk material. The temporal delay between the pulses is the key factor for surface melting. It is shown that the application of GHz bursts corrects the surface degradation caused by heat accumulation during ablation. This allows a dual process strategy to increase the ablation rates while maintaining the surface quality.