Investigation of laser percussion hole drilling by use of speckle correlation.

In this paper speckle correlation is introduced as a tool to investigate the heat-influenced area during material processing with laser light. Two materials were investigated, a pure silver sheet and a sheet of SiC-diamond composite. The processing laser used in the experiments was a diode-pumped acousto-optical Q-switched Nd:YAG laser that allowed percussion hole drilling to be performed using green light through a second-harmonic crystal.

Percussion hole drilling of metals with a fourth-harmonic Nd:YAG laser studied by defocused laser speckle correlation.

Defocused speckle correlation is introduced as a tool for measuring the response in metal sheets during percussion laser drilling. For this procedure the fourth-harmonic Nd:YAG wavelength (266 nm) was used in pulsed mode. The method provides a cost-efficient and robust alternative to speckle interferometry for the study of the small deformations that appear during laser processing.