Computer simulation of the processing of engineering materials with lasers - Theory and first applications

Current numerical simulations of laser materials processing are usually based on a greatly simplified process model in order to allow for short computation times. This significantly decreases their flexibility and ability for simulation of the great variation of today's processes and, consequently, accounting for their subtle but important differences. The theory utilized for building a simulation tool presented in this paper can be said to be truly three-dimensional as opposed to other reported work that uses symmetric boundary conditions. The interaction of the free surface of the liquid face is modelled which provides a significant increase in the amount of process detail captured. The investigators contend that numerical modelling of the above can only be achieved credibly using high performance computing methods, in particular parallelization techniques.