Laser heating of multilayer assembly and stress levels: elasto-plastic consideration

Laser heating of multilayer assembly results in temperature profiles, which differ in each layer. Depending upon the material and laser pulse properties, high temperature gradients can occur. This, in turn, results in excessive stress levels in the region irradiated by a laser beam. When the magnitude of stress level exceeds the yield stress of the material, plastic deformation is resulted. In this case, elasto-plastic analysis should be applied when modeling the thermal stresses due to a laser heating pulse. In the present study, time exponentially varying pulse laser heating of four and two layer assemblies is considered. The four layer assembly composes of gold, chromium, gold and silicon while two layer assembly is formed from gold and silicon. The resulting temperature field is obtained numerically using a control volume approach. The elasto-plastic analysis employed to compute the stress levels in the substrate material. It is found that stress levels higher than the yield stress of the substrate material occurs in the surface region. This, in turn, results in plastic zone in this region. The size of the plastic region extends towards the solid bulk as the heating progresses.