Simulation of the Reflectivity Properties of Microstructured Titanium Surface by Ray Tracing Method

Abstract

Improving light trapping properties of metal surfaces by pulsed laser irradiation based techniques is a popular research field, which has numerous promising practical applications and technological importance. Albeit several studies have been published on the control of the reflectivity properties by means of micro-and nanostructures, there are still open questions regarding the reflectivity reduction mechanism of the processed metal surface. In this work, the calculation of the reflectivity of a simulated titanium surface having microstructures prepared by femtosecond laser irradiation is demonstrated using the ray tracing method. The morphological features of the modeled surface were adopted from the paper of Nayak et al. using their SEM pictures of femtosecond laser irradiated Ti surface The simulated total reflectivity value of the surface was compared to the experimental data and good agreement was found between them. This indicates that the reflectivity properties of certain microstructured surfaces can be appropriately described by geometrical optics approaches and the ray tracing method can be a proper technique for calculating the total reflectivity value of such surfaces.