Discussion Forum

I am attempting to set up a model that simulates heating a steel sheet in air with a high power laser source such that it will melt a hole through the steel sheet. I want to know how long it takes the laser source to penetrate through the material under different conditions.

I have produced a model that uses a deposited beam power on the incident surface of the steel and can see the heating effect that it has throughout the steel and surrounding air. In a 3D model, I have used a cylinder of high density mesh in the region of interest and a coarse mesh everywhere else and it seems to work reasonably well over a time dependent study of 3 seconds. The peak temperature in the steel is reaching 11000 degrees after this time and so obviously there should be some melting / vaporisation of the material going on that I need to add to the model. At this stage I am happy to assume that material whose temperature exceeds the melting point simply disappears.

I have started trying to understand how to deform the mesh using a Deformed Geometry as the steel goes past its melting point and I am struggling to understand how to implement this. I have looked at the Heat Transfer with Phase Change option as well, but as far as I can tell, this won't remove the material from the model, only change it into a different form. Perhaps this could be used as a way to change the material into something that the laser source will pass straight through?

Any pointers on how to set up either of these approaches, or some other way of removing the material dynamically, would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.