Laser ablation heat transfer simulation

Simple heat-equation based ablation simulator. Based on https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/59916-simple-heat-equation-solv

This is a simple 2D heat equation solver to solve the ablation problem. A "semi-infinite" domain is excited with a Gaussian-profiled pulsed light radiation that is absorbed by the material with some given specified Absorbance. Input the material properties in the corresponding fields and simulate the response of the material.

We are assuming constant properties here, so the simulation is really not that accurate, but it gives a sense of what would happen to it. For example, if the temperature of the material exceeds its vaporization temperature, it is likely that the region will ablate away. Despite its lack of accuracy, the nominal "ablation fluence" values do match pretty well with the literature (from my tests).

So for rough predictions this does the job, and if you want to get more detailed you can always modify the code to include property curves for thermal diffusivity and conductivity as a function of temperature.