Ceramics have excellent heat resistance, corrosion resistance, and electrical insulation, and are active in various fields such as automobiles, information communication, industrial machinery, medical care, and so forth. They are so hard and brittle that there is a great need for the laser processing of ceramics. Throughput and quality of laser precise material processing are influenced by multiple laser parameters as well as material properties. Thus, quick survey and optimization of these parameters are quite important for higher-grade processing of ceramics. Recently, we developed Yb-doped fiber chirped-pulse amplification system operated at a wavelength of 1033 nm and a maximum power of over 100 W, that can control laser parameters (pulse duration: 400 fs to 400 ps, repetition: single shot to 1 MHz, etc.) over a wide range. In this work, using this laser system, laser processing of several ceramics such as AlN, Al2O3, YSZ was investigated. Since functional ceramics also exhibit wide-ranged properties such as thermal conductivity from 3 W·m-1·K-1 for YSZ to 240 W·m-1·K-1 for AlN, we found that the dependece of ablation volume rate on the pulse duration showed a big difference in various ceramics. We will report a fast and comprehensive survey of ultrafast laser processing of cearamics.
Keywords
- Ceramics
- Ultrafast Laser Processing