Excimer laser ablation of glass fiber reinforced liquid crystal polymer

An analytical model has been developed to predict the ablation rate of fiber reinforced polymers as a function of the fiber volume fraction and the excimer laser incident fluence. An ablation experiment was carried out to determine the effective laser absorption coefficient and the threshold fluence of ablation for a liquid crystal polymer (LCP) and the reinforcement phase, i.e., glass fiber. Employing these results in the model, the ablation rate of the LCP composite for different incident fluences was obtained. The theoretical predictions on ablation rate compare extremely well with the experimental results. In addition, the experimental results show that accumulation of gases, debris fragments, etc. in front of the sample can significantly affect the ablation rate of the composite material, especially at high pulse frequencies (>40 pulses/s).