2007 Volume 2 Pages 033
A large diameter diaphragmless shock tube has been recently developed and designed to perform detailed studies of CO2-N2 gas-dynamic laser (GDL). This large diameter diaphragmless shock tube offers various advantages over the conventional shock tubes (diaphragm-type) as longer test times, higher degree of reproducibility of shock-tube data, and especially low-impurity operation condition. The latter advantage is experimentally demonstrated herein, which is very critical issue in the CO2-N2 GDL studies. A supersonic nozzle section was mounted at the end wall of the shock tube and instrumented for simultaneous measurement of laser output power and energy. The GDL action in a CO2-N2 mixture under low impurity condition has been obtained by using the large diameter diaphragmless shock tube for the first time.
