Onto Something... (636nm 48W Array Build)

[AquaticHarpy]

After a long dormancy and moving, I finally got to my laser box. After melting a few small zinc discs with my projector arrays, I broke out my red arrays. I got thinkin, broke out the soldering iron, and got to work...


I apologize for the shitty camera quality as currently my only electronic device is a shitty chromebook, but hey,

Here's what I've done so far:

Slapped a red array onto a bigass server heatsink with some thermal paste and glue.
Soldered the contacts in that array so I only have one positive and one negative input
Prepared a few crazy powerful fans for cooling
(Day dreamed)

Plans?:

3D Print out a casing to mount the fans and array
Construct drivers for the array and the fans
Print a sort of handheld casing, rig a trigger mechanism, and have a wicked cool, (and maybe one of the most powerful portable) red laser guns!

I'll keep y'all updated on this experiment of mine, and will love to hear input!

Whatcha think of this idea?
Ideas on casings, and setup

Any other misc. items!!

Excited for progress~

 

[RedCowboy]

You could fabricate a beam expander with a concave and convex lens pair.

 

[AquaticHarpy]

To try and fix the divergence and have a more stable beam?

 

[RedCowboy]

To get your beam bundle focused into a tighter spot/cluster at further distances.
It will be difficult to correct each beam the way those arrays are arranged, not much room to work.

 

[AquaticHarpy]

So just get a concave and a convex lenses and separate them by the sum of their focal distances.. Shine into the smaller concave, get it out the larger convex for a larger beam with better divergence?

How does this work if Im wrong or if it can be done better~

 

[RedCowboy]

I tested an expedient beam expander on an nubm05 array/block HERE and it worked well, also tested one on a knife edge array I built and it was fantastic but I never tested one on my plpm4-450 array ( it's dead now ), but I'm sure it would have helped a lot.

 

[AquaticHarpy]

can a beam expander turn shittily collimated light into one confined beam?? (Curious about my knife edged projector arrays that have a focal point that melts glass and zinc..)

(edit) I saw your post and the expander only collimated the beams to a further focus point. Is there anyway to collimate all the beams into a single stable beam? Like a traditional single diode pointer throwing one long beam, how can I get one straight beam, I cant imagine the divergence of your beam at 10 feet, can only imagine where all those beams go after the focal point!

 

[RedCowboy]

No beam is perfect, any beam is diverging or converging by some amount.

If you have many beams then if you can correct each beam, then knife edge all your beams ( stacks of rows ) and use a telescopic reduction to produce a tighter beam/bundle ( smaller dia. ) beam, however your divergence will increase, but if you use a beam expander you can reduce the divergence, however the beam/beam bundle will be wider overall.
I don't know of any other/magic way to get a high quality ( small dia. ) beam from many crude beams except for pumping a crystal or pumping doped fiber such as is done in an active fiber ( double clad ) laser system.

p.s. You can zoom to focus your beam expander by making your convex lens adjustable, maybe via. PVC tubing ( slide focus ) or a set of linear motion rails, however slide focus setups can be touchy, using a threaded adjuster would be good.
We are limited with those projector arrays because each beam is diverging, Lightsuperglue did some work with them.

 

[AquaticHarpy]

fiber could be an option, if I converge all the energy into the end of a fiber optic couldnt I technically pump as much wattage through I want through it then terminate it into a simple lense like a cheap commercial pointer lense to get one decent line? Even having a 5 inch beam would be fine as long as its low divergence~ I just dont want everything falling into one focus point then having massive divergence

 

[RedCowboy]

One decent line, no because the coherence length out of your fiber will be poor.

Here's Lightsuperglue

 

[AquaticHarpy]

So I need to figure out some kind of lense setup that makes the focal point as far as possible from the output, or near the output but with good divergence

 

[RedCowboy]

You zoom to your desired distance by moving the convex lens of your beam expander, but the beams in those arrays have poor divergence and poor beam quality as the divergence of the fast axis of each beam is very aggressive, much more than the slow axis so each beams spot is a bar that grows in size un-proportionally ( a line that grows longer over distance ) .

Yes a longer FL lens would be preferable.

Remember safety 1st.

p.s. You might want to see some of the work Trinh did to get an idea. HERE