Simulation and Experimental Study of Nanosecond Laser Micromachining of Commercially Pure Titanium

Nanosecond laser machining of titanium has gained increased interest in recent years for a number of potential applications where part functionalities depend on features or surface structures with microscale dimensions. In particular, titanium is one of the materials of choice to sustain the demand for advanced and miniaturized components in the biomedical and aerospace sectors for instance. This is due to its inherent properties of high strength-to-weight ratio, corrosion resistance, and biocompatibility. However, in the nanosecond laser processing regime, the resolidification and deposition of material expelled from the generated craters can be detrimental to the achieved machined quality at such small scale. Thus, this paper focuses on the investigation of the laser–material interaction process in this pulse length regime as a function of both the delivered laser beam energy and the pulse duration in order to optimize machining quality and throughput. To achieve this, a simple theoretical model for simulating single pulse processing was developed and validated first. The model was then used to relate (1) the temperature evolution inside commercially pure titanium targets with (2) the morphology of the obtained craters. Using a single fiber laser system with a wavelength of 1064 nm, this analysis was conducted for pulse durations comprised between 25 ns and 220 ns and a range of fluence values from 14 J cm−2 and 56 J cm−2. One of the main conclusions from the study is that the generation of relatively clean single craters could be best achieved with a pulse length in the range of 85–140 ns when the delivered fluence leads to the maximum crater temperature being above but still relatively close to the vaporization threshold of the cpTi substrate. In addition, the lowest surface roughness in the case of laser milling operations could be obtained when the delivered single pulses did not lead to the vaporization threshold being reached.