Recently, I’ve seen several rust removal videos. At first I thought laser sort of “scraped off” the rust, but looking closely, I see no rust being blown away or rust powder left on the table where they perform such removal. What is really happening? Does the laser gets evaporated in the air? Or is it being “melt”? I’m curious. Cheers!
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The rust is basically vaporized and sucked off by airflow, there is air cleaning machinery down the ventilation line that catches it. This is done with nanosecond pulsed fiber lasers, it’s putting on the order of megawatt of peak power in a rather small spot, things don’t stay solid at these sorts of light intensities. It exploits the difference in reflectivity and heat conductivity of metals vs oxides. Oxides absorb light better and don’t conduct heat away as fast, so they get ablated off leaving underlying metal fairly untouched.
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