Laser materials processing with ultra-short pulses allows very precise and high quality results with a minimum extent of the thermally affected zone. However, with increasing average laser power and repetition rates the so-called heat accumulation effect becomes a considerable issue. The following discussion presents a comprehensive analytical treatment of multi-pulse processing and reveals the basic mechanisms of heat accumulation and its consequence for the resulting processing quality. The theoretical findings can explain the experimental results achieved when drilling microholes in CrNi-steel and for cutting of CFRP. As a consequence of the presented considerations, an estimate for the maximum applicable average power for ultra-shorts pulsed laser materials processing for a given pulse repetition rate is derived. femtosecond laser-written waveguides with variable repetition rate," Opt. Express 13(12), 4708-4716 (2005). 13. R. R. Gattass, L. R. Cerami, and E. Mazur, "Micromachining of bulk glass with bursts of femtosecond laser pulses at variable repetition rates," Opt.

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"Present text accompanying pictures aurally to promote learning" is a well established principle of instructional design. But recently, it was shown that under certain conditions visual texts can be preferable. Instructional pacing seems to be one of these conditions that mediate effects. Especially, enabling learners to pace an instruction has proven to enhance learning. In an online experiment, the effects of pacing and text modality on cognitive load and performance were investigated. 110 university students studied instructions paced either by the system or by the learner and using either visual or auditory texts accompanying static pictures. Learner pacing reduced mental effort and promoted performance for instructions using visual texts, whilst with auditory texts, only mental effort was positively influenced. Modality effects on performance were found in favour of auditory texts with system paced instructions, but effects vanished or reversed with learner pacing. With respect to study time, the learner paced, visual text instruction was the most efficient.

In any pulsed and repetitive laser process a part of the absorbed laser energy is thermalized and stays in the material as residual heat. This residual heat is accumulating from pulse to pulse, continuously increasing the temperature, if the time between two pulses does not allow the material to sufficiently cool down. Controlling this so-called heat accumulation is one of the major challenges for materials processing with high average power pulsed lasers and repetitive processing. Heat accumulation caused by subsequent pulses (HAP) on the same spot and heat accumulation caused by subsequent scans (HAS) over the same spot can significantly reduce process quality, e.g., when the temperature increase caused by heat accumulation exceeds the melting temperature. In both cases, HAS and HAP, it is of particular interest to know the limiting number of pulses or scans after which the heat accumulation temperature exceeds a critical temperature and a pause has to be introduced. Approximation formulas for the case, where the duration of the heat input is short compared to the time between two subsequent heat inputs are derived in this paper, providing analytical scaling laws for the heat accumulation as a function of the processing parameters. The validity of these approximations is confirmed for HAP with an example of surface ablation of CrNi-steel and for HAS with multi-scan cutting of carbon fiber reinforced plastics (CFRP), both with a picosecond laser at an average power of up to 1.1 kW. It is shown that for the important case of 1-dimensional heat flow the limiting number of heat inputs decreases with the inverse of the square of the average laser power.

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