TY - JOUR A1 - Bachmann, Marcel A1 - Artinov, Antoni A1 - Meng, Xiangmeng A1 - Putra, Stephen Nugraha A1 - Rethmeier, Michael T1 - Challenges in dynamic heat source modeling in high-power laser beam welding T2 - Journal of Laser Applications N2 - The amount of absorbed energy in the keyhole as well as its spatial and temporal distribution is essential to model the laser beam welding process. The recoil pressure, which develops because of the evaporation process induced by the absorbed laser energy at the keyhole wall, is a key determining factor for the macroscopic flow of the molten metal in the weld pool during high-power laser beam welding. Consequently, a realistic implementation of the effect of laser radiation on the weld metal is crucial to obtain reliable and accurate simulation results. In this paper, we discuss manyfold different improvements on the laser-material interaction, namely, the ray tracing method, in the numerical simulation of the laser beam welding process. The first improvement relates to locating the exact reflection points in the ray tracing method using a so-called cosine condition in the determination algorithm for the intersection of reflected rays and the keyhole surface. A second correction refers to the numerical treatment of the Gaussian distribution of the laser beam, whose beam width is defined by a decay of the laser intensity by a factor of 1/e2, thus ignoring around 14% of the total laser beam energy. In the third step, the changes in the laser radiation distribution in the vertical direction were adapted by using different approximations for the converging and the diverging regions of the laser beam, thus mimicking the beam caustic. Finally, a virtual mesh refinement was adopted in the ray tracing routine. The obtained numerical results were validated with experimental measurements. PB - Laser Institute of America KW - Laser beam welding KW - Laser energy distribution KW - Ray tracing KW - Numerical modeling PY - 2023 UR - https://opus4.kobv.de/opus4-bam/frontdoor/index/index/docId/58474 AN - OPUS4-58474 UR - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:kobv:b43-584748 VL - 35 IS - 4 SP - 1 EP - 9 AD - Bundesanstalt fuer Materialforschung und -pruefung (BAM), Berlin, Germany