PhD position – Experimental study and instrumentation of high-power, high-throughput femtosecond laser processes

Job description:

Background

Sustainable, smart manufacturing is essential to meet today’s environmental and societal challenges. Laser micromachining is a high-potential solution that meets concrete industrial needs, avoiding the use of synthetic chemicals while surpassing the capabilities of conventional processes : better resolution and versatility, and processing of a wide range of materials without tool wear.

Over recent decades, femtosecond lasers have been a major innovation : the peak powers generated enable selective material removal with micrometre resolution, causing little or no damage to material integrity. However, these technologies are still limited to extremely slow throughputs.

The challenge for the coming years is to increase their yield and make these technologies industrially viable. The high power recently available from femtosecond laser sources appears to be the key, as it opens the way to parallelised processes at very high throughput. This will require going beyond current physical knowledge of femtosecond laser material removal.

Thesis topic

A laser station equipped with the latest technologies is provided and will need to be instrumented to collect in-situ data during high-power femtosecond laser trials on various materials.

The research work should provide a better understanding of femtosecond machining capabilities at very high throughput, focusing on two key aspects:

• ablation and plasma shielding phenomena when using pulse bursts,
• characterisation of machining and thermal heating when using beam shaping and process parallelisation solutions.

Developments will be driven by application cases from the aerospace industry, with objectives of high productivity and in-line quality control. The ultimate goal is to achieve a decision-making process for choosing the best machining strategy to ensure quality and improve yield.

This work is part of LaserSurf, the joint laboratory between IREPA LASER and the ICube laboratory. Within this framework, synergies are expected with ongoing activities in technology, processes, simulation, data acquisition and robotics.

Candidate profile

Experimentalist with skills in photonics, laser processes and materials.