Abstract
A methodology is developed and used to evaluate the response sensitivity of the thermal systems to variations in their design parameters. Technique for computing the sensitivity of temperature distributions to changes in processing parameters needed to decide the more effective laser input parameters for laser surface hardening treatment is considered. In this study, a state equation governing the heat flow in laser surface treatment is analyzed using a three-dimensional finite element method and sensitivity data of the processing parameter obtained using a direct differentiation method is applied to the sensitivity analysis. The interesting processing parameters are taken as the laser scan velocity and laser beam radius ( $r_{ b}$), and the sensitivities of the temperature T versus v and $r_{b}$ are analyzed. These sensitivity results are obtained with another parameters fixed. To verify the numerical analysis results, hardened layer dimensions (width and depth) of the numerical analysis are compared with the experimental ones.nes.
