Core-doped Nd:YAG disk solar laser uniformly pumped by six Fresnel lenses

D. Garcia; D. Liang; J. Almeida

doi:10.1117/12.2030434

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18 November 2013 Core-doped Nd:YAG disk solar laser uniformly pumped by six Fresnel lenses

D. Garcia, D. Liang, J. Almeida

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Proceedings Volume 8785, 8th Iberoamerican Optics Meeting and 11th Latin American Meeting on Optics, Lasers, and Applications; 87850W (2013) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2030434
Event: 8th Ibero American Optics Meeting/11th Latin American Meeting on Optics, Lasers, and Applications, 2013, Porto, Portugal

Abstract

A novel solar laser uniformly pumped by six Fresnel lenses is proposed here. The incident solar radiation is firstly collected and concentrated by six 0.8 m diameter Fresnel lenses and then reflected by other six plane mirrors to a central focal zone, where a laser head is mounted. About 2.5 kW solar power with 3.5 W/mm² peak solar flux can be achieved in the focal zone. The laser head is composed of a fused silica six-sphere type secondary concentrator that further compresses the concentrated solar power from the six Fresnel lenses-plane mirrors to a core-doped YAG Nd³⁺:YAG ceramic disk. Optimum pumping parameters and solar laser output powers are found through ZEMAX non-sequential ray-tracing and LASCAD laser cavity analysis, respectively. The laser resonant cavity is formed by a PR 1064 nm output coupler and a HR 1064 nm plane reflector. An 8 mm diameter central hole is drilled through the six-sphere type concentrator to allow the extraction of laser power from the disk. Since only 16 % of the useful solar power is absorbed by the Nd:YAG medium, for 950 W/m² of terrestrial solar irradiation, the effective solar pump power of 456 W is assumed in ray-tracing analysis. 72.2 W of multimode laser power is predicted for an 8 mm diameter gain medium embedded within a conical undoped YAG cladding, reaching the collection efficiency of 24.1 W/m². M² = 16.6 is numerically calculated, corresponding to the brightness figure of merit of 0.26 W. A near uniform absorbed pump profile is achieved.

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D. Garcia, D. Liang, and J. Almeida "Core-doped Nd:YAG disk solar laser uniformly pumped by six Fresnel lenses", Proc. SPIE 8785, 8th Iberoamerican Optics Meeting and 11th Latin American Meeting on Optics, Lasers, and Applications, 87850W (18 November 2013); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2030434

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