ABSTRACT:
The solar-pumped solid-state laser is a device that uses the solar radiation to pump its gain medium. Up to our knowledge, all the solar lasers currently operating, are based on a single primary parabolic mirror that focuses the solar radiation on the laser gain medium. This optical arrangement constitutes a major inconvenience because, in one single beam, tens of kilowatts of solar radiation are manipulated. Besides the hazards, the heaviness of the instruments make them also hard to manipulate. To improve pumping schemes of solar-pumped solid-state lasers, optical fiber bundles for solar radiation transmission are proposed. With the flexible fiber optic bundle, we could bring the solar radiation to pump a solid-state laser inside the laboratory. We report an alternative for sun-light collection and transportation where sun light is collected with small parabolic mirrors or lenses, and concentrated on the ends of several optical fiber bundles that are placed at the mirrors/lens foci. We report quantitative measurements on the solar energy transmission and concentration scheme by using single core glass fiber, single core plastic fiber and multi core plastic fiber of different lengths and fiber numbers. In this project, one small mirror and several lenses of different focal lengths and diameters were used for this investigation. The experiments results show that the maximum optical power and efficiency is obtained by 1.5 m plastic optical cable of 15 multi cored of 7 fiber of 0.5 mm diameter using parabolic mirror. The maximum optical power, when using lenses is obtained from a 1.5 m optical cable of 20 single cored fiber of 1 mm in diameter and lens of 4 cm diameter and +200 mm focal length. The result of our simulation on Nd:YAG solar laser system shows output laser power ranges from 20 mW to 65 mW by using a combination of many parabolic mirrors/ lenses with 1.5m fiber bundles of different core number and diameter.