Making a portable CO2 laser?

[Xray_Wombat]

well...
worth resurrecting that topic for some art. A few light weight brass appointments, a 70 year old mA meter for tube current, and a little gothic touch here and there and you got a nice steampunk laser. Very authentic 80 Lb backpack as well.. but why skimp on batteries or go for short-duty stuff? Might get 2 hours of beam time from a 100AH 12V AGM. Coolant temp could become an issue as most of those tubes want 20-25 deg water.. chiller's not practical to carry. Palte cooled thermoelectric maybe but still it's a 400W heat load!

 

[diachi]

I for one don't fancy carrying around a >60lb lead acid battery. Not to mention everything else.

 

[Xray_Wombat]

It's certainly not practical in any way.

 

[clay77]

I have tried myself something similar but nothing so i bought a new one from China

 

[WizardG]

Not unless you have a heart condition. They only need 20-something mA, and the flyback would be current-limited to this value. 20mA will hurt a lot, but it's not lethal.



RF pumping is way less efficient than electrical pumping. Something like 5% for RF and 20% for electrical. Not ideal for battery power.



I looked it up, and the RF is 45MHz. The biological absorption profile and penetration depth is different at this frequency. It is also at less than half the power of a microwave magnetron. The energy is not directional like a magnetron is. The physiological dangers are therefore categorically quite a bit less.

I don't disagree with you very often Cyp', but that statement about the current limit on a flyback in a ZVS circuit......

I've built quite a few ZVS+flyback circuits and the higher power ones will do several hundred mA into an arc. The flyback will be destroyed in under a minute at those kinds of currents but that's plenty of time to electrocute yourself.

 

[Unown (WILD)]

Well that was nearly 5 years ago. This thread was bumped by a newbie who may potentially be a returning banned member that just got banned for posting porn. Please keep in mind the dates in the future guys

 

[wolfram]

go to amazing one

 

[Hemlock_Mike]

That goes for HV in general - not just high frequency stuff. Interesting fact: RF stuff generally won't hurt because your nerves don't have time to depolarize and thus send a pain signal to your brain. Even if RF stuff doesn't kill you, it'll give you nasty burns.

And don't ever touch the high impedance foils on the laser tube. They will arc before you contact them !!!

 

[raavikant]

Hello folks!

I've recently been considering constructing a portable CO2 laser.
I realized that when I built my 7W NUBM44 lightsaber, I dug myself into a bit of a hole - in order to make my next 'viral' video, I have to top that!

I essentially have two options:
(1) a diode array, which will be expensive and have a very spread-out beam,
(2) a portable CO2 laser, which will have short runtime but much more concentrated power.

I would much prefer a portable CO2 - it has not been done many times before, and I think it would be unique and impressive.
Anything in the range of 30-40W would be fine, and the duty cycle does not have to exceed 30 seconds.

Unfortunately, I don't quite know where to start. I haven't dealt with CO2 lasers before.

What kind of battery would be necessary to accomplish this? What kind of power supply? And how should the wiring be done?

Is this solved now?