Fiber Optic Y Connection Question

[CoryG]

I've been looking into building a fiber laser and am wondering if anyone has any knowledge of how much loss to expect if you were to splice fiber optic resonator cables (something akin to one of these) together to produce a Y-shape.

I know I wouldn't be able to utilize double clad or polarized fiber in this configuration (and the Bragg gratings might be a bitch, but there seems to be a promising method that involves heating a section of the fiber and twisting it), but would it be possible to use a bunch of fiber lasers in a binary tree configuration to boost the power?

 

[Cyparagon]

Why not just use a longer length of fiber?

 

[CoryG]

Why not just use a longer length of fiber?

I was under the impression that the practical limitation of a single fiber resonator was around 1MW, after which the dopants inside the fiber cause the photons' wave functions to propagate outside of the fiber.

For my application I only need around 200W (building a 3D printer that will handle plastics [via extrusion], ceramics and metals [via sintering]) in short pulses - but when reading about fiber lasers and fiber disk lasers and the associated materials costs I couldn't help but wonder if it would be possible to build a configuration of fiber lasers with the fiber resonators fusion spliced onto a normal piece of fiber that has been configured as a binary tree to prevent leakage.

A logical first step would be to see if I can build a fiber laser though.

 

[Cyparagon]

What's wrong with CO2? Much cheaper, much simpler, much smaller.

 

[CoryG]

What's wrong with CO2? Much cheaper, much simpler, much smaller.

CO2 Lasers are much larger than fiber lasers (with power supply, pump diodes and heat sinks you can fit a 200W fiber laser into something the size of a small oscilloscope - the laser itself is just a coil of fiber optic cable).

Fiber lasers also live longer. If I can find someone with a fusion slicer and access to a low power UV excimer laser locally to use on a Bragg grating mask set on top of some UV sensitive fiber my total cost should be right around $400 for a 0W-200W variable version.

The response times on fiber lasers are also much better, which for DMLS allows you to control things like crystal morphology and ultimately has a huge impact on the strength of your prints.