Just tinkering with something 638nm RED 8W and bright as hell.

[andyf97]

reaching 9W now of 638nm, Be patient, I will show some photos soon as it us safe to take some without destroying my CCD. I still have a scatter issue that prevents using a camera.

[steve-o]

I know I don't have to say it, but watch out for stray reflections off of windows, a misplaced piece of metal etc.. At those power levels even clear glass could shoot something back that could destroy an eyeball .. I know you already know this but I'm mainly putting it out there for newcomers to this forum who are watching this thread and may be interested in buying something similar ..

Looking forward to those pics !!!

[Soulstorm]

Love seeing new forays into 'the red problem'. Exciting stuff, thanks for sharing it Andy! When information is commercially sensitive I can understand reservations.

If you like these but want to check out something similar available on market, on my red quest earlier this year, saw the dilas style in this thread, Necsel too makes a similar RGB range, two stripe output generally.. 5-8W 640nm http://necsel.com/pdf/necsel_red.pdf Would be some interesting correction optics for sure.

Few other similar sources out on market but those Necsel emitters seemed most available, not the cheapest though.

[andythemechanic]

5-8W 640nm http://necsel.com/pdf/necsel_red.pdf

Nice find! I think this is the same bar just soldered by another manufacturer. From the very detailed datasheet you can also see what beam quality you can expect from this bar with just a collimation. In the 4mm axis you have more than 40mrad full angle which gives you a beam quality of ~40 mm mrad (half angle, half area). So to achieve 1m rad divergence you will need a 160mm beam. So unless you have some very special optics at hand to transform this it's useless for show lasers. Even if you have this optics it's useless in my opinion because you can only distribute this beam quality into the other axis, after all this are still 20x the beam size of a single mitsu broad stripe and you just will not achieve the power/brightness ratio of a singlemode diode, no way!

Andreas

[Soulstorm]

Hi Andreas,

You may be right, these bars could be integrated in varying output levels for a few different companies, 20 emitters seems standard, necsel, dilas and a few others have all very similar products.

Thought I may have stumbled upon the holy grail after seeing their multi watt RGB product array. Too bad it's all for video/tv, which seems the way the market is going more often than not.. not the best news for us. My rough calculations were discouraging also, however didn't realize it was that much of a hassle! Perhaps only good for alignment free fat statics or bounces.. lumias.. but if not lumia, the optics alone maybe make it not cost effective.. however seems Andy may have a souped up version of this, which could be good for a power density improvement.

Interesting times ahead.. I'm hoping for more single mode, there is a new hene equivalentish diode hopefully released by Q4....

[steve-o]

Well they do have a fiber option. How hard would it be recollimating the output from fiber? I used to hear of lightshow companies doing it all the time. Leave the big gassers in the truck, pipe the light in for the show ..

[andyf97]

Well they do have a fiber option. How hard would it be recollimating the output from fiber? I used to hear of lightshow companies doing it all the time. Leave the big gassers in the truck, pipe the light in for the show ..

Steve,

It is not hard at all if the fiber is less than 50um but like always there is a problem; you cannot stick a 100um emitting Laser Diode source down a <50um fiber. It just does not fit. )

I spent about two years trying such ideas out with various fiber types and widths; in the end I used some for one show and then gave up as it was too much hassle.

There are also losses to be had with thin fibers which could be as much as 70%, so it gets to a point of not being worth it. But on the other hand you can make some super nice color mixing by sticking RGB heads into a fiber because all three inconsistent colors entering the fiber emerge from the other end of the fiber all the same size, divergence etc.. So you can make the purest possible beam colors without any fringes.

I am not an expert in fibers so I might not be 100% with my facts and welcome anyone to correct me.

[andythemechanic]

At DILAS we realize up to currently 100W of 638nm into a 400µm fiber but thats the same beam quality these bars can deliver in their slow axis so it will not get any better. With some beam transformation it is possible to couple into 200µm (several bars ~50W or so) and with some complicated beam transformation it might be possible to couple into 100µm but for scanned projections this is still not good enough in my opinion.

[steve-o]

Steve,

It is not hard at all if the fiber is less than 50um but like always there is a problem; you cannot stick a 100um emitting Laser Diode source down a <50um fiber. It just does not fit. )

I spent about two years trying such ideas out with various fiber types and widths; in the end I used some for one show and then gave up as it was too much hassle.

There are also losses to be had with thin fibers which could be as much as 70%, so it gets to a point of not being worth it. But on the other hand you can make some super nice color mixing by sticking RGB heads into a fiber because all three inconsistent colors entering the fiber emerge from the other end of the fiber all the same size, divergence etc.. So you can make the purest possible beam colors without any fringes.

I am not an expert in fibers so I might not be 100% with my facts and welcome anyone to correct me.

I could live with 30% of 10 watts of nice red as long as it wasn't a flashlight and of course it would depend on the price of one of these arrays. That could be very prohibitive ..

How's your project going Andy?

[andyf97]

At DILAS we realize up to currently 100W of 638nm into a 400µm fiber but thats the same beam quality these bars can deliver in their slow axis so it will not get any better. With some beam transformation it is possible to couple into 200µm (several bars ~50W or so) and with some complicated beam transformation it might be possible to couple into 100µm but for scanned projections this is still not good enough in my opinion.

Indeed, 100um will deliver a nice round very very huge divergence red pyramid.

And what this would cost does not bare even thinking about.

I was thinking for a few years about tapered fibers and they do indeed exist but they also do not go to a very small size, maybe 400um down to 200um. The cost for one was about 2,000 dollars and not a lot to gain from it.