End-side-pumped Nd:YAG solar laser with four Fresnel lenses

B. Galinhas; D. Liang

doi:10.1117/12.2026096

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18 November 2013 End-side-pumped Nd:YAG solar laser with four Fresnel lenses

B. Galinhas, D. Liang

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Proceedings Volume 8785, 8th Iberoamerican Optics Meeting and 11th Latin American Meeting on Optics, Lasers, and Applications; 87850G (2013) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2026096
Event: 8th Ibero American Optics Meeting/11th Latin American Meeting on Optics, Lasers, and Applications, 2013, Porto, Portugal

Abstract

Solar-pumped solid-state lasers are promising for renewable extreme-temperature material processing and space power applications. An efficient Fresnel lens solar laser pumping approach is proposed here. The incoming solar power is firstly collected and concentrated by four 800 mm x 800 mm square Fresnel lenses and redirected by four plane mirrors to a central focal spot of 12 mm FWHM diameter, attaining 443 W concentrated solar power. Secondly for further concentration, both a set of four aspherical lenses and a fused silica sphere are positioned in the focal zone. Both side-pumping and end-pumping are achieved simultaneously for a 7 mm diameter by 12 mm length Nd:YAG single-crystal rod mounted within the sphere. Since there is no strong pump radiation absorption within the central core zone of the rod, thermal lensing effect is also minimized with the proposed scheme. A 600 mm length plane-plane resonant cavity is used to extract 1064 nm laser emission efficiently. Optimum pumping parameters and solar laser output powers are found through ZEMAX non-sequential ray-tracing and LASCAD laser cavity analysis. By taking into account 16 % of spectrum overlap between the 1.0 % Nd:YAG absorption spectrum and the solar spectrum, 183 W absorbed solar power is assumed in ZEMAX numerical analysis. Considering a round trip loss of 1.32 % for the resonant cavity, 45.2 W laser power is numerically attained through LASCAD software, corresponding to 17.7 W/m² collection efficiency. The proposed pumping scheme presents an excellent compromise between the laser output power and its beam quality.

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B. Galinhas and D. Liang "End-side-pumped Nd:YAG solar laser with four Fresnel lenses", Proc. SPIE 8785, 8th Iberoamerican Optics Meeting and 11th Latin American Meeting on Optics, Lasers, and Applications, 87850G (18 November 2013); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2026096

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