Investigation On Rapidly Tunable Technology Of Grating Line Selectable TEA CO₂ Lasers

High power high repetition rate rapidly tunable TEA CO₂ lasers have widely applications in laser atmosphere detecting, laser machining, laser chemistry and so on. This paper focuses on some key problems in the rapidly tunable technology of grating line selectable TEA CO₂ lasers, and the theoretical and experimental work has been carried out. After investigating throughly the development and the key technology of rapidly tunable TEA CO₂ lasers at home and abroad, the theory foundation of tunable TEA CO₂ lasers is introduced, the scheme of grating line selection is chosen to realize rapidly tuning of TEA CO₂ lasers, the technology and scheme is analyzed an discussed. The direct drive AC servomotor is firstly used to drive high-speed rotating and precise orientation of the grating. The positional closed loop direct drive AC servo system is realized with the motion controller and the high precision photoelectric encoder. The precise rotational position of grating is detected in real-time. The triggering control circuit and control software of the system is designed and debugged to match the rotating of the grating and the synchronous triggering of the laser. At the same time, in order to shorten the tuning time, the position synchronous triggering technology of the grating is proposed and adopted. The orientation error caused by the frequently starting and stopping of the grating is decreased. The positional precision is improved and the rapidly tunable output of grating line selectable TEA CO₂ lasers is realized, 85 lines of tunable output is obtained, the energy of 18 lines is more than 10J. In the rapidly trigging experiment, among them, the tunable output of two random lines of the whole CO₂ laser spectrum and two adjacent lines of the same transition band is realized respectively in 60 ms and 20 ms.The rapidly tunable output of grating line selectable TEA CO₂ lasers is realized successfully in this paper, the technology will be used in rapidly tuning of high power wide spectrum range tunable TEA CO₂ lasers, it has more reference value to design and develop the rapidly tunable output of the high power high repetition rate tunable TEA CO₂ lasers.