ABSTRACT

The availability of lasers as a source of thermal energy has led to their use in a variety of situations in many diverse fields, such as laser material processing and laser surgery.1 They have the advantage that they can deliver known levels of power into small regions remarkably accurately; although a powerful laser is itself not small, its output can be delivered relatively simply in a manner that can be very accurately controlled. This feature makes lasers very suitable for automated processes. The fact that the absorbed power level can be estimated fairly accurately means that the effects of the thermal input, both the desired ones and the undesirable side-effects, can, in principle, be estimated relatively accurately. This is another advantage in work where precision is important, and is a principle reason why thermal modeling is valuable; but it has many aspects. It can be used, for example, to gain a fundamental understanding of the processes involved, or it can be used to demonstrate which effects are important and which are of lesser importance in a given context. It can be used to analyze situations where undesirable side-effects are discovered, or to save development time by means of elaborate computational models that have been shown to be capable of producing accurate numerical agreement with the results of earlier experiments.