combine beams? Your ideas?

[nikola tesla]

thanks a lot! really helpful comment and it tought me a lot
have a way better picture now of what polarization is and I didnt think you can actually influence or make this visible by just rolling the source.
I liked how your answers went from "yep" over" "kind of" to "almost" as my questions got more obscure xD
Ok i guess we have a pretty intersting concept here!
So with knife edging the beam gets thicker with every beam that is added? I thought ive seen an array were AFTER this there was one big lens that was hit by all those beams and made one small beam out of them (or at least thats what it looked like).
So in order to combine diodes to concentrate the most power on one spot (that may vary in distance) wich technique would be best?

 

[LaserAdct]

So with knife edging the beam gets thicker with every beam that is added? I thought ive seen an array were AFTER this there was one big lens that was hit by all those beams and made one small beam out of them (or at least thats what it looked like).

So in order to combine diodes to concentrate the most power on one spot (that may vary in distance) wich technique would be best?

1) Yes, the more diodes you knife edge the bigger the beam gets. The big lens you refer to is a telescopic lens that narrows the beam width and height.

2) The best technique, for most power, is knife edging since you can combine a lot of beams. I think I saw an array of 32 combined beams somewhere

I can recommend the dichros from o-like. I use them myself in a RGB setup. You can see it in the link in my signature (cheap heatsink for... - scroll down on page 1. More details on the mounts can be seen on page 2).

I had no issues at all combining 3 beams with my homemade dichroic mounts. It was actually piss easy, mind my french I have made new ones with black coating etc both for turning mirrors and dichroics. The turning mirrors are made from harddisk plates which are probably one of the best mediums for this. The plates are made of aluminum coated with nickel so the first surface that the laser hits is the reflective one, compared to an ordinary mirror where the back surface is the reflective one. I will make a new tutorial, but that will come at a later time.

best regards.