Pulsed laser cleaning of aluminium-magnesium alloys: effect of surface modifications on adhesion

Surface cleaning is a key step in many industrial processes and especially in laser surface treatments. During laser cleaning of metallic alloys using pulsed lasers, surface modification can be induced due to transient thermal effect. In ambient atmospheric conditions, an oxidation of the cleaned surface can be detected. The aim of this work was to characterize this transient oxidation that can occur below the laser energy domain leading to any phase change (melting, ablation) of the cleaned substrate. A Q-switched Nd:YAG laser (1.06 μm) with 10 ns pulse duration was used for this study. X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy and secondary ion mass spectroscopy were used for surface analysis of irradiated samples. Thermal oxidation took place on the aluminium-magnesium alloy (5000 series) during the irradiation in air (fluence range 0.6-1.4 Jcm-2). It has been demonstrated that this 10 ns laser thermal oxidation and the steady state thermal oxidation have the same mechanism. When the laser fluence reached 1 J cm -2 , the oxide formed by the thermal oxidation became in a large extent crystalline and its outer part was entirely covered by a continuous magnesium oxide layer.