Study of ablation on surfaces of zircaloy Z-4 irradiated with femtosecond laser

Abstract

The use of ultrashort femtosecond laser pulses is an alternative for micro machining on metal surfaces, with several industrial applications, in such areas as aeronautics, aerospace, naval, nuclear, among others, where there is growing concern about service reliability. Thus, markings for traceability purposes should ensure the integrity of the metal as well as allow reading of the marked characters, whether automated or not. In this work, micro machining of zircaloy Z 4 surfaces using femtosecond laser was performed aiming at the knowledge of the ablation threshold and Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) analysis in different images. Obtained from micro machined traces, energy fluence parameters and laser pulse overlap. The amount of ablated material in this femtosecond laser micro machining is negligible, which contributes to ensuring that there is no mi crostructural damage. Such a process resulted in different images, which characterize that there are different optical properties because of the parameters change.