A Study on Dispersion Behaviors of Fume Particles in Laser Cutting Process of Optical Plastic Thin Films

The optoelectronic display units such as TFT-LCD or OLED require many thin optical plastic films and their mass manufacturing processes employ CO2 laser cutting of those thin films in a large quantity. However, laser film cutting could generate fume particles through melt shearing, vaporization, and chemical degradation and those particles could be of great concern for film surface contamination. In order to appreciate the fume particle dispersion behaviors in laser film cutting, this study relies on random particle simulations by probabilistic distributions of particle size, ejection velocity and angles coupled with Basset-Boussinesq-Oseen model of particle trajectory in low Reynolds number flows. Here, up to one million particles of random sampling have been tested to effectively show fume particles dispersed on the film surface. The computational results could show that particular range of fume particle size could easily disperse into the pixel region of processed optical films.