A steady-state semi-analytical approximation of melt pool evolution in pulsed laser surface melting

Pulsed laser surface melting (pLSM) is a technique that offers an efficient and effective way to modify the geometry surfaces without any addition or removal of material. The resultant surface geometry plays a critical role in several applications. This paper presents a steady-state thin-film approximation of the melt pool created by pLSM and the resulting semi-analytical solution for the evolved surface geometry. These predictions of the semi-analytical solution are then compared with a validated numerical solution. The comparison demonstrates a good match with errors ranging from ~4% to ~25% across several pulse durations. Larger errors are observed at comparatively lower and higher pulse duration. Smaller errors are observed for intermediate pulse duration values because of the deviation of non-dimensional numbers from their assumed orders. Overall, the thin-film solution is a reasonable and useful approximation of the evolved surface geometry through the pLSM process, thus saving significant computational costs.