We report on the use of a kW USP (ultrashort pulse) laser system for high throughput industrial drilling, applied to the production of large micro-perforated panels, used for a new airplane drag reduction technique. In order to limit the heat accumulation due to the high power and maximize productivity, we parallelize the process: the beam is first split into sub-beams sent to different processing units, and then further split into multi-beams focused on the workpiece. Handling a kW USP laser beam makes it necessary to consider thermal regulation and potential damages. We discuss several design challenges, present results of a drilling study that illustrates how beam management strategies impact drilling quality and yields, and finally present the technical solutions implemented within a functional industrial prototype using a kW femtosecond laser.
In this presentation we discuss the developed solutions based in both monitoring as well as control strategies for the use of laser in two applications in which we profit from the laser advantages by developing sensors and detectors that can be used to either provide in-situ information or establish closed-loop controls. The first application is the removal of excess of material with laser cutting in parts fabricated by forging related techniques. Since burrs and other defects are not regular, the most optimal cutting parameters do not always guarantee successful cutting of the excess of material. A home-made monitoring system based on the capture of the scattered light of the laser beam can provide information about the effective removal of material and hence, it can be employed for automated operations. The second application deals with the micro-drilling of large surfaces. In fact, in this application it is highly desirable to have a tool that could inform somehow about the performance of the process in order to obtain a feedback about the final quality. For this, an optical sensor monitoring the scattered light of the processing laser has been placed at the top and bottom of the processed panel. Deviations of the signal during micro-drilling can be correlated with local defects of the process performance.
Laser projection devices should be designed to maximize their luminous efficacy and color gamut. This is for two main reasons. Firstly, being either stand alone devices or embedded in other products, they could be powered by battery, and lifetime is an important factor. Secondly, the increasing use of lasers to project images calls for a consideration of eye safety issues. The brightness of the projected image may be limited by the Class II accessible emission limit. There is reason to believe that current laser beam scanning projection technology is already close to the power ceiling based on eye safety limits. Consequently, it would be desirable to improve luminous efficacy to increase the output luminous flux whilst maintaining or improving color gamut for the same eye-safe optical power limit. Here we present a novel study about the combination of four laser wavelengths in order to maximize both color gamut and efficacy to produce the color white. Firstly, an analytic method to calculate efficacy as function of both four laser wavelengths and four laser powers is derived. Secondly we provide a new way to present the results by providing the diagram efficacy vs color gamut area that summarizes the performance of any wavelength combination for projection purposes. The results indicate that the maximal efficacy for the D65 white is only achievable by using a suitable combination of both laser power ratios and wavelengths.
In this work we have constructed a range gated imaging LIDAR with the aim to show the potential of this
technique as well as to further determine aspects such as the typical energy per pulse needed, the illumination
distribution of the laser source and the safety class. For this, we built a custom frequency doubled nanosecond
pulsed Nd:YAG laser as illumination source, a CCD coupled to a generation II image intensifier and a simple
progressive delays set for the camera gate using a pulse delay generator. At low levels of the illumination pulse
and assuming safety perimeter around the system of approx. 1.5 m, the LIDAR could be classified as class 2M.
In these conditions, we could resolve objects as far as 690 m.
The laser-diode self-mixing technique is a well-known, powerful, very simple and low cost interferometric technique. The typical structure of a laser-diode self-mixing device is made up of a laser-diode, a focusing lens and a processing unit. One can find in literature numerous examples of target displacement, fluid flow, velocity, distance and vibration measurements. Regarding vibration measurements, the self-mixing effect has been mainly applied to measure amplitude and frequency in isolated points but it is difficult to find real applications in which this technique is applied to measure the vibrating behavior of a complete surface. This is due to the different feedback signals that may appear when a laser beam is scattered by a real rough surface. When scanning a surface, the different speckle patterns that contain the feedback signal at different points introduce big changes in the intensity of the scattered signal captured by the photodiode that drives the laser into a strong coupling self-mixing regime with loss of the sinusoidal behavior of the fringes. In many cases, saturation of the photodiode is also found. When this occurs, it is not possible to measure any vibration parameter. By programming simple algorithms, this problem can be overcome. Here we present vibration measurements of titanium tweeter membranes up to 6.8 Khz that show the vibrating behavior in the micrometer range. We demonstrate that the limit in the frequency range is set by the sample frequency of the data acquisition device. Results are compared with different optical techniques for mapping vibrating surfaces such as laser triangulation and electronic speckle pattern interferometry.
The optical design of a laser scanning picoprojector can be separated into discrete tasks. Typically, diode lasers are employed and their highly divergent emission is firstly collimated. Some beam shaping is required since the asymmetric divergence from diode lasers is converted to an elliptical collimated beam. The red, green and blue beams then need to be combined to produce a single beam which can be controlled to present any colour of the available colour gamut. The final step of the process is to direct the combined beam towards a MEMS scan head comprising a single, bi-axis or two, single axis scanning micro-mirrors.
There is currently an impetus to embed picoprojector opto-electro-mechanics into other devices such as mobile telephones and this restricts the 3D volume available for the collimation, beam combination and MEMS scan head. Even for a standalone picoprojector there is an incentive for a compact design.
So along with conventional optical engineering tasks such as lens design, Gaussian beam propagation, tolerancing, laser safety and design for manufacture, there is an additional task of determining the best optical architecture to achieve the goal.
Here we present a design study of a laser scanning picoprojector where the various optical architecture possibilities are presented. A novel solution is presented which has been built as a prototype projector and which offers excellent future miniaturisation possibilities.
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