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 floor, cleanroom, medical operating room, clinics, and laboratory environments. Laser product managers are seeing similar pressure to reduce the size of the external laser chiller while still offering improved cooling and energy efficiency. Some are considering adding the refrigeration system directly into their laser system to form an integrated compact package. It is important to make decisions early in the concept development of the product development cycle to ease integration of advanced cooling methods such as direct refrigerant cooling. Below, are a few selected applications in the Photonics industry.
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
- The Aspen solution is a 2RU chiller that can be tabletop or rack mounted.
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
