The potential of the gas cooled disk architecture to operate at kilowatt to megawatt levels of average power is explored. The key issues investigated are flow and heat transfer in the cooling channel, the power required to perform the cooling and its implications for overall system efficiency, flow conditioning in the drift region, losses due to turbulent scattering, and beam quality due to optical distortions. In all cases an understanding of the issues leads to ways to mitigate or eliminate deleterious effects. Our conclusion is that the gas cooled disk geometry is an architecture which can lead to devices which are capable of average power levels reaching from a few kilowatts up to hundreds of kilowatts per beam line without stressing existing engineering or technology.

Date Published: 6 July 1989
PDF: 19 pages
Proc. SPIE 1040, High Power and Solid State Lasers II, (6 July 1989); doi: 10.1117/12.951166

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 1040:
High Power and Solid State Lasers II
George Dube, Editor(s)