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Which is the BEST laser color for BURNING?

kecked

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Find out what your object strongly absorbs and chose that wavelength. Reread what I posted.
For example if something is colored red you likely don't want to use a red laser to heat it as it will reflect most of the energy but that same object might be "black" ie absorbs strongly to IR or Blue light.

Shine a blue light on a red ball. It appears black. It absorbs the energy.
 





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On the topic of getting thread alerts, I use an email address to get alerts that a thread that I posted to has gotten a new post to it. You can do this in the setup procedure.
 
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Well. technically there's alot of factors that come into play for heating things/"burning" things with lasers, but the three biggest things are often power, absorbtion, and beam profile. wavelength doesn't have a ton to do with it for your purposes, except in relation to what your burning being able to absorb the light or not vs reflecting it. from a science standpoint, shorter wavelengths have more energy per photon. (UV>Visible>IR for example) but what you're using also has to be readily absorbed by what you're burning. a visible laser isn't going to cut glass, or clear acrylic but a CO2 laser is going absolutely annihilate it for example, as glass is transparent to us, but to deep IR it is very opaque. DPSS lasers (like 532nm), if properly made, have far better beam profiles than diode lasers, but diodes when focused properly still do a very nice job.

Assuming you just want to pop balloons and do some safe burning of spots on wood or something like that a blue 447nm laser or in that area, maybe a 405nm laser, are going to be your best bets for power vs cost, while still being useful. It will also be easy to maintenance and build, and be resilient to being abused. I tend to find at the lower powers 405 burns better, mostly because of it having a circular/even profile more so than the 445s which are usually more like a bar unless you get a fairly good quality/pricy one (not ones out a projector or something). downside is they're alot harder to see and won't appear nearly as bright per mW to your eye, so it will seem deceptively save by comparison. a few mW of violet is actually very hard to see. and 100+ mW that you'd need to burn things would be very dangerous to your eyes. make sure you have good safety glasses and understandings of how to protect your eyes and others' eyes before doing any of this. One slip up can cost you or someone else dearly-control of the area is the name of the game. Professionally most laser experiments are not done in free space, they are done at waist level usually, often enclosed or on a walled table so any stray beams are caught and carefully controlled, and kept away from passerby. please be very careful and responsible.

Edit: Sorry, I know I'm chiming in a bit late, but thought this would be helpful
 




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