Hello from the north

[BLACK]

Hey everyone, I don't really know anything about laser pointers and I joined this forum to ask if there were any commercially available laser "pointers" that would be able to heat up an area of a sample of material to a maximum temperature of 500 degrees celsius. After bumming around for a few days on the internet this forum looked like the best place to ask a question like this!

The reason I ask is for one of my university design classes my group has been tasked with developing a station to hold material samples. Amongst other constraints one of the mandatory things is we must be able to heat the sample up to 500 degrees celsius.

The project is for a hard x-ray beamline which is using x-ray diffraction to analyze material structures. Because material structures change with temperature they want to be able to analyze a material at room temperature and then again at high temperatures to see what has changed. The reason a "laser pointer" to achieve this goal would be useful is because there is a very limited amount of space available for equipment to produce this temperature. Also the sample is very small itself, and the area at which the temperature would have to be 500 degrees is very small also.

Is this something that present technology would even allow (Note: some experiments may take up to a week to complete so at worst case scenario the sample would have to stay at 500 degrees celsius for up to a week)?

Any insight is much appreciated!

 

[anselm]

Hello and welcome to the LPF!:wave:

I imagine it'll be terribly difficult to maintain a precise temperature with a laser pointer...
Even if you have a thermic sensor on your sample, feeding that into the lasers driver....
I don't know, MIGHT be possible, but not very straightforward.

You can heat stuff up to and beyond 500C with lasers, no doubt, but....
It is one thing to just poke holes in stuff, like we doD), and another what you have in mind.
There are very few members who are into using lasers to work on material.

It's mostly about the beams and the oohs and the aahs.

If constructed (read= heatsinked) correctly, runtimes of one week shouldn't pose a problem.

One more tip, try the Photonlexicon, those guys are on a much more "pro" level than us tinkerers.

 

[albrco0]

Hi! I'm new too! Welcome!

 

[Helios]

If you had the sample hooked up to a thermostat you could set it up to turn on and off the laser to maintain a temp range but to maintain it at exactly 500 degrees would be hard using a laser.