A Brief Analysis on the Working

Principles and Categories of the CO2

laser
The first usage of CO2 laser was in 1964 with wavelength of 10.6m. As
its a very efficient laser, its conversion efficiency can reach up to
10% as a business model; thus its widely used in laser cutting, welding,
drilling and surface treatment. As a commercial application laser, it can
reach 45 KW as the most powerful material handling laser.

1.Working principles
CO2 laser is a kind of excimerlaser, whose main substance is CO2.
Its different energy states depend on its vibration and rotation form.
For the basic energy network, please refer to Fig 1. The gas mixture in
CO2 is formed through electron releasing. As the Maxwell-Boltzmann
distribution law says, molecules present a variety of excited states in
plasma. Some high-energy states (00o1) molecules present their asymmetric

swing state. When collide with hollow wall or emanate naturally, the
molecule will lose energy accidently. Through natural emanation, the
high-energy state will fall to symmetrical swing state (10o0), and it can
also emit photons (light beam with wavelength of 10.6m) that can spread
to any direction.
Fig 1. Simple energy level diagram of CO2
Generally, the working substance of CO2 laser consists of mixture gas
composed of CO2, Helium and Nitrogen gas. As buffer gas, Nitrogen gas and
its molecule transmitter exciting energy to CO2 resonantly. As the
relaxation level (01110) is the bottleneck, Helium is used to transfer
energy to helium atom (01110) as the heat sink.
2.Categories of CO2 laser
Waste heat rejection plays a very important role in laser system designing.
Theoretically, there are two possible ways. The first is based on
automatically processing steam for its natural diffusion to pipe-wall.
The second is based on air forced convection; its working principle is
fast axial flow laser. Basically, there are five CO2 lasers:
Sealed type or no flow type
Slow axis flow
Fast axis flow
Fast transverse flow
Transverse excitation atmosphereTEA
Sealed or no flow type CO2 laser is usually used in beam deflection laser
for marking. Its discharging tube is completely sealed. It has high
quality. Its easy to maintain, because in most cases the discharging
tube can be renewed and reaerated. Thus there is no need to use separated
gas. What we need is some connection for the laser head. Thus its compact
and lightweight but with lower energy output (less than 200W).
TEA CO2 laser is usually used in the manufacturing of shield. It operates
only by pulse, with low airflow and high air pressure. Its driving voltage
is about 10000 V. The energy of this kind of laser beam distributes in
relatively laser areas. Its highest energy can reach up to 1012 W with
small pulse width. Nevertheless, this type of laser can hardly focus on
small point due to its multimode operation.

3.Power supply of pump

There are three means of power supply for pumps generally, as for CW CO2
laser; such as direct current (DC), high frequency (HF) and radio
frequency (RF). The power supply design of DC is quite simple. Electron
alternates around 20-50 KHz in HF power supply. Compared with DC, HF power
supply is dense in size and with high efficiency. Electron alternates
around 2-100 MHz in RF power supply. Compared with DC, the voltage and
efficiency of RF power supply is relatively lower.