This work presents a new technique to remove the surface impurities from the aluminum cold-worked sheets. The method consists to concentrate a short-time high-power pulsed laser on the materials surface and scan it in order to cover a desired area. Incrustations ablation is obtained as long as the fluency and the peak power are high enough to produce vaporization of the contaminated layer without affecting the material surface properties. The present problem consists in eliminating a desiccated soap of about 1 g/m² from the surface of a 6016-class aluminum alloy sheet. The soap is originated from the rolling process. The present laser method is intended to replace water washing when the piece cannot be soaked, when drying is difficult due to the geometry, or when environmental restrictions apply. Best results were obtained when the pulse length was 100 ns and the average laser power was 95 W. In these conditions, the surface was completely cleaned and the aluminum alloy did not suffer any structural modification.

This paper describes the determination of the thermal diffusivity of LiKSO4 crystals using the photoacoustic phase lag method, in the 77 K to 300 K temperature interval. This method is quite simple and fast and when it is coupled to a specially designed apparatus, that includes a resonant photoacoustic cell, allows for the determination of the thermal diffusivity at low temperatures. The thermal diffusivity is an important parameter that depends on the temperature, and no values of this parameter for LiKSO4, at low temperature, have yet been reported. The LiKSO4 is a crystal with many phase transitions which can be detected via the anomalies in the variation of the thermal diffusivity as a function of the temperature.