Diagnosis and simulation of high speed drilling

Laser drilling is a thermal ablation process being about to be widely applied in ablating and hole drilling applications, such as the drilling of filters, sieves or injection nozzles. This work describes advances in fundamental physical modeling, experimental diagnosis as well as time varying processes like drilling a prescribed hole shape. The laser drilling process is represented mathematically by a three-dimensional free boundary problem for the motion of two phase boundaries, namely, the solid-liquid and the liquid-vapor boundary. In drilling the mechanisms governing the shape of the drilled hole -still showing efficient melt removal -are identified experimentally and can be related to the processing parameters theoretically.