COIL activities in Germany

Abstract

COIL activities in GermanyWilly L. BohnDLR Institut fur Technische Physik,Postfach 800 320,D-70503 Stuttgart, GermanyABSTRACTThe major effort in German research work related to oxygen-iodine laser technology is devoted to investigations of asupersonic multikilowatt laser device. The laser facility and latest performance data will be presented and compared with theinternational state-of-the-art. The laser operation is supported by a number of small scale basic experiments aimed at thediagnostics of 02('A), the visualization of iodine mixing, the chemical properties ofthe basic constituents and the simulationof liquid jet type generators. Special emphasis is given to the perspectives of COIL industrialization. Propagation of iodinelaser radiation and a concept for excited oxygen generation based on frillerenes will also be addressed.1. INTRODUCTIONThis paper reviews German activities related to the chemical oxygen iodine laser (COIL) technology. Since most of thoseactivities are performed by the DLR Stuttgart, this paper concentrates on the status of work at the DLR Research Center.However, it also addresses measurements of COIL propagation through the atmosphere at 1.315im obtained by theForschungsinstitut fur Optik (FF0), Tubingen, and investigations on the generation of excited oxygen molecules fromfullerenes which will be started soon by a group at the University of Duisburg.Prior to any further description of the current status of work in this area it appears worthwhile to analyze in general the futuretrend of high power lasers. The extrapolated time evolution of the power domain of the principal laser classes is veryqualitatively shown in Fig.1. Today, gas lasers mostly cover the medium and high power operation regime; in the future further4)