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Ablation-cooled material removal with ultrafast bursts of pulses

Nature volume 537, pages 84–88 (2016)Cite this article

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Abstract

The use of femtosecond laser pulses allows precise and thermal-damage-free removal of material (ablation) with wide-ranging scientific1,2,3,4,5, medical6,7,8,9,10,11 and industrial applications12. However, its potential is limited by the low speeds at which material can be removed1,9,10,11,13 and the complexity of the associated laser technology. The complexity of the laser design arises from the need to overcome the high pulse energy threshold for efficient ablation. However, the use of more powerful lasers to increase the ablation rate results in unwanted effects such as shielding, saturation and collateral damage from heat accumulation at higher laser powers6,13,14. Here we circumvent this limitation by exploiting ablation cooling, in analogy to a technique routinely used in aerospace engineering15,16. We apply ultrafast successions (bursts) of laser pulses to ablate the target material before the residual heat deposited by previous pulses diffuses away from the processing region. Proof-of-principle experiments on various substrates demonstrate that extremely high repetition rates, which make ablation cooling possible, reduce the laser pulse energies needed for ablation and increase the efficiency of the removal process by an order of magnitude over previously used laser parameters17,18. We also demonstrate the removal of brain tissue at two cubic millimetres per minute and dentine at three cubic millimetres per minute without any thermal damage to the bulk9,11.

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Figure 1: Principles of ablation-cooled removal of a material by laser.
Figure 2: Scaling down of the pulse energy with increasing repetition rate.
Figure 3: Ablation of hard and soft tissues.

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Change history

  • 29 September 2016

    The x-axis numbering in Fig. 2c and 2d was corrected.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported partially by the European Research Council (ERC) Consolidator Grant ERC-617521 NLL, the European Union (EU) FP7 CROSS TRAP and TÜBITAK under projects 112T980, 112T944 and TEYDEB-3110216. C.K. acknowledges funding from TÜBITAK - BIDEB 2211. We thank Y. Aykaç and V. Aykaç for dental experiments, T. Dalkara, M. Yemişçi Özkan, K. Kılıç for brain tissue experiments, G. Aykut for animal care and brain slicing, I. Mirza, K. Yavuz, G. Makey and M. Karatok for data acquisition and analyses, S. Karahan for histology analyses, A. Büyüksungur and BIOMATEN (METU, Ankara, Turkey) for micro-CT analyses, H. Köymen for PZT characterisation and S. Ilday, O. Tokel, H. Çelik, O. Algın and E. Atalar for critical reading of the manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, Bilkent University, Ankara, 06800, Turkey

    Can Kerse, Denizhan K. Kesim, Önder Akçaalan & Fatih Ömer Ilday

  2. Department of Physics, Bilkent University, Ankara, 06800, Turkey

    Hamit Kalaycıoğlu, Parviz Elahi & Fatih Ömer Ilday

  3. Department of Mechanical Engineering, Bilkent University, Ankara, 06800, Turkey

    Barbaros Çetin

  4. FiberLAST, Inc., Ankara, 06531, Turkey

    Seydi Yavaş

  5. Nanotechnology and Nanomedicine Department, Hacettepe University, Ankara, 06800, Turkey

    Mehmet D. Aşık

  6. ASELSAN, Ankara, 06150, Turkey

    Bülent Öktem

  7. Menlo Systems GmbH, Am Kloperspitz 19a, Martinsried, 82152, Germany

    Heinar Hoogland & Ronald Holzwarth

  8. Department Physik, Lehrstuhl für Laserphysik, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU), Erlangen, 91058, Germany

    Heinar Hoogland

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  1. Can Kerse
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Contributions

C.K., H.K. and F.Ö.I. designed the research and interpreted the results. H.K., P.E., S.Y., Ö.A., and C.K. developed the laser systems. H.H. and R.H. developed a high-repetition-rate fibre oscillator. C.K., D.K.K. and B.Ö. performed the laser processing experiments. B.Ç. and C.K. developed the numerical models. M.D.A. carried out brain slicing and histological examinations.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Fatih Ömer Ilday.

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Competing interests

F.Ö.I., C.K. and H.K. declare competing financial interests due to a pending patent application regarding the technique outlined in this Letter.

Additional information

Reviewer Information Nature thanks K. Mitra and the other anonymous reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

Supplementary information

Supplementary Information

This file contains Supplementary Text and Data, Supplementary Figures 1-47, Supplementary Tables 1-5, Supplementary Video legends and additional references (see Contents for more details). (PDF 16783 kb)

Animated version of the schematic description of ablation cooling in Figure 1

The colouration is based on a mapping of temperature profiles as determined from simulations for the case of 800-MHz pulses (ablation cooling regime) and 10-MHz pulses (outside of the ablation cooling regime). The time and depth coordinates are normalized to characteristic values, as defined in the section below on numerical simulations. While the simulations are 1D, we have taken the liberty of assuming that the profile stays the same in drawing cross-sectional temperature profiles for simplicity. This approximation will not, however, change the main features of the result and the movie is intended to be an illustration, and not an accurate representation of the simulation results. (MP4 288 kb)

Shot during material processing experiments using 100-MHz intra-burst repetition rate pulses and 25-kHz uniform repetition rate results on a steel target with the same power.

The major difference in the sound and plasma brightness is indicative of and consistent with roughly order of magnitude increases in ablation rates in the ablation-cooling regime. (MP4 6552 kb)

3D representation of the laser-processed brain tissue

This video shows a 3D representation of the laser-processed brain tissue obtained through micro-CT imaging. (MP4 9292 kb)

Dentine processing experiment

This video shows the dentine processing experiment using the traditional regime with same power and duration as in Supplementary Video 5. The results of this experiment are shown in Figure 3c. (MP4 693 kb)

Dentine processing experiment

This video shows the dentine processing experiment using the ablation-cooled regime with same power and duration as in Supplementary Video 4. The results of this experiment are shown in Figure 3d. (MP4 505 kb)

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Kerse, C., Kalaycıoğlu, H., Elahi, P. et al. Ablation-cooled material removal with ultrafast bursts of pulses. Nature 537, 84–88 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature18619

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