Design of a Heat Dissipation System for a Low Power Fibre Laser
S. Dey, P. Kalvettukaran and D. Misra
An attempt has been made to develop a heat dissipation system to ensure stable and efficient running of an indigenously built fibre laser system. The indigenously built laser system comprising of laser diodes, among other things, suffered from overheating, and, thereby, the conversion efficiency of the developed laser system went down drastically with the rising operating temperature of the system. The main aim of the heat dissipation system proposed is to maintain the laser diodes within a certain threshold temperature (typically below 30oC), such that the system operates with satisfactory wall plug efficiency. Under the ideal operating condition, the fibre laser system is designed to deliver 100 W of laser output requiring an electrical input of 278 W; thus, it needs a heat dissipation system that can remove 178 W of thermal energy generated by a system of six laser diodes combined together, maintaining the safe working temperature of the diodes. The design of the cooling system is achieved through systematic analysis of the heat and fluid flow in the system using COMSOL Multiphysics.
Keywords: Fibre laser, laser diode, silicon, Si, gallium arsenide, GaAs, heat dissipation system, COMSOL Multiphysics, numerical model, computational fluid dynamic (CFD), fluid flow of air, temperature field, non-isothermal flow interface (NITF)