Thermal Blooming On Laser Propagation In An Aspirating Pipe

Thermal blooming effect of gas on laser propagation can seriously degrade performance of far-field beam quality and energy distribution. Numerical simulation is carried out to study the influences of thermal blooming on laser propagation in line pipes. A physical model of thermal blooming effect of gas on laser propagation in an aspirating pipe is established. Axial flow and suction in the outlet are used to attenuate the thermal blooming effect. Based on the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software, stable calculation of flow field is carried out first, then the optical field and the fluent field is coupling calculated by means of user defined function (UDF). The results show that radial flow is enhanced in the aspirating pipe and the index of refraction gradient caused by thermal blooming effect is decreased. It is indicated that the beam quality of the outlet is improved compared with the pipe model without aspirating. The optical path difference (OPD) distribution of the outlet is analyzed and decomposed by Zernike polynomials. It is shown that the defocus item of 4m aspirating pipe is decreased more than an order of magnitude compared with the 4m pipe without aspirating.