Influence of pulse duration on the process of laser marking of CT80 carbon tool steel products

Abstract Depending on the processing of a particular material, the laser marking process must meet certain requirements. A certain laser peak intensity or fluency must be reached on the treatment surface above which the laser ablation process starts. Some experimental studies have shown that this particular marking threshold is related to many other parameters characterizing the laser source. This requires the realization of an appropriate combination of peak power or pulse energy and the radius of the beam in focus, the frequency of the laser pulses as well as the pulse duration. Achieving high resolution in the marking process requires optimal focusing, and this in turn is associated with the presence of high quality generated and propagated laser radiation. The study concerns the process of laser marking of CT80 carbon tool steel products with wide application in industry. Numerical experiments are performed with specialized software TEMPERATURFELD3D to obtain two-dimensional and three-dimensional temperature fields in the laser impact zone. The influence of the duration of the pulses of fibre laser on the process is investigated. Graphs of the dependence of normalized temperature on time and depth for pulse duration on 10 ns, 100 ns and 1 μ s are discussed.