Process limits for percussion drilling of stainless steel with ultrashort laser pulses at high average powers

Abstract The availability of commercial ultrafast lasers reaching into the kW power level offers promising potential for high-volume manufacturing applications. Exploiting available average is challenging due to process limits imposed by particle shielding, ambient atmosphere breakdown, and heat accumulation effects. We experimentally confirm validity a simple thermal model, which can be used estimation critical threshold percussion drilling AISI 304 steel. are summarized in processing map, provides selection criteria parameters suitable lasers. results emphasize need parallelization.