High Power Fiber Laser: Fiber Optic laser weapon

I read about this a year or two ago, but I pretty much forgot all about it until recently. I don't believe I've ever seen a thread about it on here before.

High Power Fiber Lasers (HPFL) have the potential to become one of the principal technologies for defense against the rapidly proliferating unmanned airborne threats. The High Power Fiber Lasers program will develop and demonstrate single mode fiber lasers with output powers of nearly one kilowatt from a single aperture. Tens of kilowatts output power and capability to scale to greater than 100s of kilowatts output power and beyond will be demonstrated through coherent combining of the output power from multiple fiber lasers.

The High Power Fiber Lasers program will develop and demonstrate single mode, single polarization fiber lasers with output powers greater than one kilowatt from a single aperture. Tens of kilowatts output power and capability to scale to greater than hundreds of kilowatts output power and beyond will be demonstrated through coherent combining of the output power from multiple fiber lasers. High power fiber lasers will provide a quantum leap in defense capabilities by simplifying the logistic train and providing a deep magazine, limited only by electric power, in a compact footprint. For theater/area defense and self-protection of combat platforms, they will provide speed of light engagement and flexible response against cruise missiles, reconnaissance unmanned air vehicles (UAVs), and rockets...

HPFL

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[edit on 7-2-2006 by UK Wizard]

Here is a new news brief about HPFLs I got from Janes. I thought the Air Force or the Army would be the ones wanting to develop this. It looks like the Navy will have multiple laser weapons just like the Air Force. FEL for ships and HPFLs for aircraft.

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Within a decade the US Navy wants to develop a high-powered laser small enough to fit on a tactical combat aircraft and powerful enough to ...

Janes

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[edit on 7-2-2006 by UK Wizard]

The reason these fiber optic lasers are more powerful is because they can be bent, unlike normal laser rods/slabs. Normal laser rods/slabs can not be bent, they need a reflector (cavity) to direct the light from a flash tube (like in a camera) into the laser rod. Alot of the light needs to make multiple rebounds off the reflector before it hits the rod and makes it "lase", alot of that light gets turned into heat as it hits the reflector (cavity).

Fiberoptic lasers can be bent and coiled around the flash lamp many times and don't have as much as a need for a reflector. Alot more light enters the laser fiber and because the fiber can be thiner and is flexible, heat/cooling is not much of a problem as it is in rod/slab lasers.

They didn't really make them more efficient, they optimized the configuration for the least losses of light and the most losses of heat.

Similar fiberoptics have been used for years at welding and cutting at machine shops around the world... we have a few models at our uni