Many lasers into one, by means of fiber glass

Here the article describes how many lasers have been combined into one by means of fiberglass rods. If this works out to be practical perhaps this could be a way to use fifty 0.2watt dvd lasers to form a 10watt sintering laser.

Anyways, just an idea.. I just wanted to throw this out there.

Hi TheTechnicalNoob,

Optical fiber lasers have been out for quite some time now (BTW, no relationship with fiberglass whatsoever). These are quite inexpensive if made in China. [en.wikipedia.org] [www.rp-photonics.com]

bowzee

... read here - [www.photonlexicon.com]

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Viktor
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Aufruf zum Projekt "Müll-freie Meere" - [reprap.org] -- Deutsche Facebook-Gruppe - [www.facebook.com]

Call for the project "garbage-free seas" - [reprap.org]

You can't combine lasers like this, unless they are exactly the same wavelength, and in phase with each other, or completely different wavelengths. Otherwise, you get a bunch of destructive interference, and don't actually end up with more power. Actually, this is not quite true, as you can combine two of them at different polarizations with a polarizing beam splitter.

Using multiple diodes of the same wavelength won't get you much as a result, since the wavelengths are not controlled, unless you also temperature control them. This is the reason that people usually knife edge the beams to stack them, and combine them that way, alas this type of multimode beam will not focus to a spot at all.

You can find many articles that describe these beam combining problems on the laser forums, like photonlexicon.

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Mike Anton
[manton.ca]
[laserlight.wikidot.com]

Would you not just use multiple identical lasers, collimating lenses with known focal length fed to another collimating lens in to the optic cable?

Not really. As the waves of light would start to interfere with each other and start to cancel each other out. So you would have to get the wave lengths into sync with each other which isn't practical.