Abstract
A 5 kW cw CO laser has been designed and constructed to demonstrate the scalability of anexcitation scheme used and to study its industrial applicabilities. An apparatus and performancecharacteristics are described. In this system, a transverse self-sustained dc glow discharge isapplied to excitation, and a subsonic laser mixture is cooled through heat exchangers operatingwith liquid N2. A cooling system is designed so as to maintain uniform temperature distribution inthe discharge and to keep temporal temperature fluctuation minimum. Using a three-pass stableresonator, we obtained a laser output of 6.7 kW with an electrical conversion efficiency of 22% for a mixture of CO/N2/He/ O2=6/16/78/0.4 (%) at 170 K. The dependence of outputand efficiency on gas temperature, flow velocity, etc. are discussed. Continuous operation for upto 4 h and output beam characteristics are also reported.
