doi: 10.3850/978-981-11-0749-8_716
Laser-Induced Oxidation of Titanium
T. A. Jwad, Sunan Deng, Haider Butt and S. Dimov
Mechanical Engineering, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, United Kingdom
Abstract
Titanium oxides have a wide range of applications in industry, and they can be formed on pure titanium using different methods. Laser-induced oxidation is one of the most reliable methods due to its controllability and selectivity. The colourizing process based on laser scanning strategies is limited by the relative large processing area in comparison to the beam size. Single spot oxidation of titanium substrates is proposed in this research in order to increase the resolution of the processed area and also to address the requirements of potential new applications. The method is applied to produce oxide films with different thicknesses and hence colours on titanium substrates. To investigate the process capabilities and limitations of the proposed method a high resolution colour image is imprinted on a sheet of pure titanium by converting its pixels’ colours into laser parameter settings. Optical and morphological periodic surface structures are also produced by an array of oxide spots and then analysed. The findings are of interest to a range of application areas, as they can be used to imprint optical devices such as diffusers and Fresnel lenses on metallic surfaces as well as for colour marking.
Keywords: Laser-induced colourizing, Titanium oxide, Single spot oxidation, Colour patterning, Colour coding.
