Thermal-mechanical analysis of the surface waves in laser cleaning

The work described in this paper is to investigate the particle removal mechanism by surface wave in laser cleaning. A mathematical model of laser cleaning processes was established for a flat plate to remove micro-particles from the surfaces by surface waves. The software ABAQUS, based on finite element method, was used to simulate the non-linear stress wave problem for an uncoupled thermal-mechanical system in a two-dimensional domain. The result shows that the cleaned area increases with the laser energy, which led to surface waves with large acceleration in the vertical direction, but the effective cleaned area decreases with an increase of the laser spot size.