Laser-Assisted Processing of Metals and Alloys

Dear Colleagues,

This is an open invitation to contribute to a Special Issue of Metals on Laser-Assisted Processing of Metals and Alloys.

We start from the premise that any material could be melted/vaporized under high intensity laser irradiation by either pulses or continuous beam. New top industrial applications can be envisaged and designed on this basis. Thus, one can tune the melting process to develop high-performance cutting, welding, marking or additive manufacturing technologies. As the laser beam can be focused in a very narrow spot, these operations can be conducted with a precision in the micrometric range. This is difficult to reach by other processing techniques.

On the other hand, laser beams can hardly process thick metal sheets because of the mandatory removal of large amounts of molten material from the irradiation site, and the inherent geometrical difficulties. Moreover, the most powerful laser sources in IR (e.g., CO₂ at 10.6 μm) are incompatible with common metals used in industry (Al or Cu), due to the high reflectivity/low absorptivity (energy transfer) at these wavelengths.

New industrial challenges were proposed in recent years via various laser-assisted processes, such as welding of incompatible materials for cells of electrical batteries, relief marking by laser cladding, heterogeneous laser welding, thermal treatments by laser irradiation, laser microstructuring for improving surface properties or metal nanoparticles synthesis.

In additive manufacturing, laser beams are used for in situ building and alloying metal and metal matrix composite parts. Multilayer metal structures can be synthesized by laser melting deposition or configurations with enhanced topology and convoluted shapes, impossible to manufacture by conventional casting, become feasible via layer by layer build approaches.

This Special Issue is opened to specialists in materials science and metallurgy, where lasers stand for a processing tool of metallic materials. High quality, novel and original research papers or reviews that highlight the latest trends in laser-assisted processing of metallic materials will be welcomed to this Special Issue.

Waiting for your important contributions and wishing you prolific scientific achievements under these hard pandemic times!

Dr. Andrei C. Popescu
Dr. Liviu Duta
Dr. Ion N. Mihailescu
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the Special Issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-anonymized peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Metals is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.