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The non-equilibrium evaporation of metals is increasingly important in recent applications of high
intensity power sources such as lasers, electron beams and arc heated plasmas. Powerful jets
of evaporated metal arise when cw-lasers or pulsed laser beams are used, especially in surface
processing, ablation and sublimation cutting.
An exact understanding of the physical conditions in this evaporation jet is essential to control
the ablation rate and minimize the energy loss due to evaporation by adjustment of the external
process parameters. The ablation jet is maintained by an appropriate supply of newly evaporated
particles and in effect sets the boundary conditions for the hydrodynamic or plasma regime that
arises. Exact knowledge concerning the metallic vapour that constitutes the plasma which arises
in a wide variety of material processing techniques with a high intensity beam allows to predict
the ignition behaviour of the plasma vapour. This is a particular advantage since the presence
of the plasma can totally change the physical behaviour of the process. In high intensity beam
welding processes a narrow keyhole appears filled with metallic vapour whose behaviour does not
depart too strongly from equilibrium. The plasma which is detected in the keyhole is important
for the energy transfer from the incident beam to the workpiece1, so that in this case the physical
conditions in the vapour are of special interest, as they determine the development of the plasma.
When a metal surface is heated to a temperature close to the boiling point of the material of
which it is composed, a jet of evaporated material originates at the metal surface. Depending on
the surface temperature and the external pressure, the evaporation process ranges from a steady
state of thermodynamic equilibrium which describes a vapour with constant spatial density and
temperature, and no significant net motion, to one involving a strong non-equilibrium process with
a velocity up to the local speed of sound. In all but the equilibrium case, however, a thin surface
layer, known as the Knudsen layer, forms in the vapour. The transition from a non-equilibrium
velocity distribution at the metal surface to a local Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution some few
mean free paths above the metal surface occurs in this layer.
This non-equilibrium regime is described by Boltzmann's equation which is solved here in the
BGK approximation. This is achieved by employing an iteration algorithm for the solution of
an equivalent integral equation with suitable boundary conditions. The temperature, density and
velocity either in or behind the Knudsen layer are derived together with the velocity distribution
function everywhere in the layer.
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