In recent years laser technology has increasingly developed with the use of
fiber lasers and this has provided the possibility to implement different techniques in
the defense industry. LADAR is at the forefront of these techniques. Fiber lasers
constitute a perfect source for LADAR systems due to their excellent robustness,
compact size and high-power generation capability. In this study we will explore the
development of a pulsed fiber laser source for a LADAR system that can obtain high
resolution 3D images in eye-safe region.
A high power, all fiber integrated erbium system with strictly single mode
operation in eye-safe region based on MOPA (master oscillator power amplifier)
configuration with seed source and amplifier part was developed. Both the use of an
actively mode locked laser with erbium doped fiber and fiber coupled modulated
distributed feedback diode laser were investigated as seed sources for the amplifier
part. Both erbium doped single clad fiber and erbium-ytterbium doped double clad
gain fiber were used in this amplifier system. After amplification of the actively
mode locked laser, 12 W of average optical power was obtained through single
mode fiber with 1ns pulse duration at 10 MHz which corresponds to 1.2 kW peak
power. For the fiber coupled DFB diode laser, 9.5W average power was obtained
with around 8 ns duration pulses at 100 kHz and about 9.2 W average power was
also obtained with around 700 ps duration pulses at 1 MHz through strictly single
mode fiber at the output of the same amplifier system as was used in the actively
mode locked seed source. In both cases calculated peak power was around 10 kW
v
which is estimated as the highest peak power for an all fiber integrated system with
single mode operation.
The development of such a fiber system with high power capability, compact
size and free of misalignment is expected to be useful for LADAR application as
well as other areas such as eye surgery, 3D silicon processing or any other material
processing applications.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:METU/oai:etd.lib.metu.edu.tr:http://etd.lib.metu.edu.tr/upload/12614635/index.pdf |
| Date | 01 August 2012 |
| Creators | Dulgergil, Ebru |
| Contributors | Altan, Hakan |
| Publisher | METU |
| Source Sets | Middle East Technical Univ. |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | M.S. Thesis |
| Format | text/pdf |
| Rights | To liberate the content for public access |
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