2000-AO-Preparation of Fiber Optics for the Delivery of High-Energy High-Beam-Quality NdYAG Laser Pulses文档.pdfVIP

Preparation of fiber optics for the delivery of high-energy high-beam-quality Nd:YAG laser pulses Andreas Kuhn, Paul French, Duncan P. Hand, Ian J. Blewett, Mark Richmond, and Julian D. C. Jones Recent improvements in design have made it possible to build Nd:YAG lasers with both high pulse energy and high beam quality. These lasers are particularly suited for percussion drilling of holes of as much as 1-mm diameter thick a few millimeters metal parts. An example application is the production of cooling holes in aeroengine components for which 1-ms duration, 30-J energy laser pulses produce holes of sufficient quality much more efficiently than with a laser trepanning process. Fiber optic delivery of the laser beam would be advantageous, particularly when one is processing complex three-dimensional structures. However, lasers for percussion drilling are available only with conventional bulk-optic beam delivery because of laser-induced damage problems with the small-diameter approximately 200–400- m fibers that would be required for preserving necessary beam quality. We report measurements of beam degradation in step-index optical fibers with an input beam quality corresponding to an M 2 of 22. We then show that the laser-induced damage threshold of 400-m core-diameter optical fibers can be increased significantly by a CO2 laser treatment step following the mechanical polishing routine. This increase in laser-induced damage threshold is sufficient to propagate 25-J, 1-ms laser pulses with a