On Thu, 20 Oct 2016 12:33:50 -0500, dpb wrote:

On 10/20/2016 11:47 AM, wrote:
On Thu, 20 Oct 2016 07:22:11 -0700 (PDT), wrote:
...

Heating to how hot? ~60-100 C or heating to 1000 C,
or laser melting and cutting?

George H.
Up to about 200 C.

And what volume of a specimen of what size do you intend to heat?
Lasers are quite local in their application of energy, "not so much"
when it comes to bulk effects.

Applications like surface heat-treating rely on scanning a laser over
the surface and surface heating the local area to a very shallow depth
leaving the bulk material temperature essentially unchanged. It's
self-quenching into that cool reservoir that's the hardening mechanism
as opposed to bulk immersion of a heat-treated part in conventional heat
treatment.

What's the end objective here, really???

And, what specific materials?


I dunno which metals yet, It depends on which ones can be easily
heated. Steel, copper alloys, zinc, and tin are ones I want to try
though.The laser will be scanned.
Thanks,
Eric