Minimum Damage in CFRP Laser Processing

Laser processing of carbon fibre reinforced plastics (CFRP) is believed to be one of the key technologies to allow introducing this material into mass production. The main challenge in handling thermal material damage is proper thermal management. The current paper introduces a “perpendicular heat flow” model which describes the sublimation process providing a 1-dimensional analytical solution of the heat conduction equation. This solution is used to calculate the minimum achievable damage in the matrix material. With this model the optimum pulse parameters according to quality needs can be deduced, presuming the correct spatial intensity distribution.