Combining two 40 watt tubes into a single cutter?

[LeonS]

I had a weird thought this morning as I lay in bed in a reverie trying to muster enough energy to make the morning coffee. I was wondering if there are beam combining technologies that would allow two 40 watt laser beams to be combined to make an 80 watt beam. 2 40 watt tubes are cheaper than an 80, or close to it.

I know there are ways to add a red aiming laser in to the cutting beam's path. I wonder if that device cold combine the two cutting beams. I suspect not.

It seems as though there would be some advantages to having two active tubes. They would operate at a lower power level for many jobs. If one died you could continue with just one tube until a replacement arrives. The cutter could be smaller if you can "stack" the tubes one on top of the other.

Just a crazy thought.

Regards,
Leon

[Mike-f]

This was an idea that I had considered before at it make a much more compact machine. It seems like some of the current. Battlefield lasers do this with multiple yag sources. Guess you can get a beam combiner to suit but I think the beams would need to be polarized?

Mike

[lasersafe1]

Correct. The beams would need to be linearly polarized. The glass tube lasers from China are generally unpolarized. If they were polarized, then they could be combined with orthoganal polarization states through a polarized beam combiner cube to get pretty close to the sum of the individual lasers. In the end it would cost more for the beam combining optics than simply purchasing the higher power laser tube. It is also a pain to align the beams precisely on top of each other.

[LeonS]

Thanks for the education fellows. I concur with Lasersafe1 that there is no financial advantage to the idea. I could see how alignment could be very difficult.

Cheers,
Leon

[lasersafe1]

I actually designed and built a system that combines three lasers into a single beam. They are each 1 watt 780nm, pulsing at 500 MHz phased 120 degrees apart to give a pulse train of 1.5 GHz (1.5 Billion pulses per second all locked to an external timing source) with each of the three pulse intensities adjustable with the individual laser. I could use the orthoganal combination method to get 100% from two of the lasers, but when I had to introduce the third, I had to use a conventional 10:90 beam combiner. It takes many mirrors to give me the freedom to align all three beams into a single collimated beam. That's my work. CO2 engraving and CNC machining is just a hobby.