Computer modelling of the laser ablation of polymers

Laser ablation of polymers has been the subject of extensive studies for nearly three decades. Results of these investigations have shown that thermal effects play an important role during frequency tripled nanosecond Nd:YAG laser ablation of polyimide. Despite of the studies, effect of these processes has not been satisfactorily clarified. Thermal effects, photochemical and other phenomena still exist and so the thermal modelling of laser ablation is a very specialised problem. The investigation in this paper deals with special conditions in thermal models, which highly differ from more common conditions. Although there are numerous excellent thermal modelling software available, mainly in the field of electronics technology, these are not suitable or ready for handling special conditions, for example the removing of material from the domain under investigation, which is one of the most important areas. Hence we decided to develop a special thermal modelling tool. The model designing aspects which define the development process are presented in this paper.