Laser Cooling
Compact Laser Chillers and Cooling Applications
The trend of higher laser output power in increasingly smaller packages has many benefits in reducing the floor space requirements in production floors, cleanrooms, medical operating rooms, clinics, and laboratory environments. Laser product managers are under increasing pressure to add the refrigeration system directly into their laser system to form an integrated compact package. It is important to make decisions early in the concept stage of the product development cycle to ease the integration of advanced cooling methods such as direct refrigerant cooling. Below, are a few selected applications in the Photonics industry.
Miniaturized Active Cooling for Medical Aesthetics Lasers
- Patient Comfort – Skin contact surfaces must stay cool to reduce pain and mitigate burn risk during treatments
- Laser Diode Reliability – Stable junction temperatures extend diode lifetime and maintain consistent optical output
- Treatment Effectiveness – Consistent cooling improves energy delivery profiles and clinical outcomes
Surgical Laser Cooling - Compact, Quiet, Precise.
- Precise Temp. Control – Stable coolant loops protect wavelength stability and optics alignment
- Low Acoustic Noise – Quiet operation supports patient comfort and surgeon focus
- Scalable Supply – From EVT/DVT/PVT to serial production. Global supply to support device launches and geographic expansion
Active Cooling in Large Format Laser Projectors
- Digital Projection, Ltd is a leader in high brightness, large format laser projectors for digital cinema.
- The design goal for a new Satellite platform was to integrate a laser chiller into the 4U rack mount which houses the RGB laser diodes and power electronics.
- They selected Aspen Systems’ LCM-900 due to its small size and high reliability
Cooling High Power UV LEDs for Curing Applications
- UV LEDs are used extensively for curing inks and coatings.
- Excessive heat will dramatically affect the lifetime and performance of UV LEDs.
- Typical chillers for this application are larger than the power supply for UV LED
Direct Refrigerant Cooling of Laser Systems
- High power lasers are ubiquitous in manufacturing and materials processing.
- Active cooling is required for the optical pump source in the laser.
- Chillers typically used are high maintenance with low MTBF leading to downtime and failures
- Aspen Systems has developed a direct refrigerant cooling system that is more reliable, maintenance free, and more efficient.
Techniques in How to Cool Lasers
- This article published in Laser Focus World
- The write-up discusses the merits of air, TEC, liquid and direct refrigerant cooling
- It reveals how to get the highest cooling power in a small, reliable platform
