Transient evaporative laser-cutting with boundary element method

A computational model for the simulation of a transient laser-cutting process has been developed using a time-dependent boundary clement method (BEM). An unsteady heat transfer model is considered that deals with the material-cutting process using a continuous Gaussian laser beam. The geometric nonlinearity due to the melting region is handled by an iterative scheme. Convergence analyses are performed with various meshes and time steps for the groove shapes and temperature distributions. Studies with the time-dependent BEM show excellent agreement with the results of steady-state BEM in terms of groove shapes and temperature distributions. Material removal process renders some parts of melting surface at the present time be affected more by the distant past than the recent past. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved.