Dec 24 2012
A consortium of companies and research institutes from five European countries has joined forces in a common EC funded research project to achieve dramatic improvements in the brilliance of high-power direct diode laser systems.
BRIDLE makes use of a modular, scalable and upward compatible approach, employing advanced technologies and beam combination architectures, leading to a diode laser source that delivers more than 2kW output power from a Ø100µm, NA<0.15 optical fibre with a power conversion efficiency >40%.
Novel diode-laser mini-bars will be developed by the consortium targeting a 3x higher brilliance compared to commercially available broad area emitters, with dense and coarse spectral multiplexing schemes pursued for power scaling. In addition, coherent beam combining techniques that phase-couple bars to produce nearly diffraction limited output will be investigated.
During the project, a sequence of increasingly brilliant demonstrators will be developed, each targeting a specific industrial application. Manufacturability and cost down-scaling issues are also addressed by integrating micro-optical beam shaping and beam combination into the production process.
The project, which started September 1st 2012 and runs for three years, receives funding of about €3m from the European Commission’s FP7 Theme 3 “Information and Communication Technologies” program.
Coordinated by DILAS Diodenlaser GmbH in Germany, the consortium includes researchers from University of Nottingham, United Kingdom, the Fraunhofer Institute for Laser Technology ILT and the Ferdinand Braun Institute FBH, both Germany, the Laboratoire Charles Fabry of the Institutd’Optique at CNRS, France and the industrial partners Modulight of Finland and Bystronic, Switzerland.
More information can be found on the project website at www.bridle.eu. Interested parties may also ask to be put on a mailing list to receive the project e-Newsletterevery ninemonths.