Numerical modeling of thermoelastic laser-generation of ultrasonic waves

Laser generation of ultrasound is investigated numerically in the presented paper. The coupled heat and wave equations are solved with Finite Difference Time Domain (FDTD) and Finite Element Methods (FEM). The influence of the thermal feedback on the propagating pulse shape is investigated providing evidence that the coupling introduces dispersion in a non-dispersive system. In addition, wave fields from a line focused source are presented by a numerical model.