Material removal effect of microchannel processing by femtosecond laser

Material processing using ultra-short-pulse laser is widely used in the field of micromachining, especially for the precision processing of hard and brittle materials. This paper reports a theoretical and experimental study of the ablation characteristics of a silicon wafer under micromachining using a femtosecond laser. The ablation morphology of the silicon wafer surface is surveyed by a detection test with an optical microscope. First, according to the relationship between the diameter of the ablation holes and the incident laser power, the ablation threshold of the silicon wafer is found to be 0.227 J/cm(2). Second, the influence of various laser parameters on the size of the ablation microstructure is studied and the ablation morphology is analyzed. Furthermore, a mathematical model is proposed that can calculate the ablation depth per time for a given laser fluence and scanning velocity. Finally, a microchannel milling test is carried out on the micromachining center. The effectiveness and accuracy of the proposed models are verified by comparing the estimated depth to the actual measured results. (C) 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.