EEVblog 1412 - Argon Ion Laser TEARDOWN!
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- Опубликовано: 28 июл 2024
- Dave tears down the 10W Coherent 300C Argon Ion laser. All 42kg, 1.2m and 24kW worth!
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PSU teardown: • EEVblog 1381 - Argon I...
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#ElectronicsCreators #Laser #Teardown Наука
It's a water heater (25kW) with coherent power on indicator (10W).
Turbo kettle
This thing is more efficient than the average politician!
I see the sticker on it from AvE channel. " Not to be operated by... "
One of the most intresting water heaters around.
@Stephen Ferree lol. perfect.
Donate it to Photonicinduction to derive maximum tolerance values 😄
Came here to say this!!!
@@psutherla 😄👍🏻
For the first time: Don't take it apart, Turn it on!
Plug it into the Hopi, I want to see the power factor.
... in other news... Widespread power blackouts throughout Australia! :)
Small problem of a 24kW supply.
@@EEVblog You MIGHT be able to run it at noon from the solar power grid there. But if a cloud happened by the laser would quit
@@EEVblog I had one in my lab back when I though science was a noble life..... It had 208V 3-Phase power and we had it coupled to our buildings chiller water feed through a heat exchanger... If you work in Big Science - all Lab Spaces come with multiple wall outlets with the following: (1) 208V 3 Phase Power, 240V Two Phase power (2) Nitrogen (3) Vacuum (4) Water - and in the chemistry building they still had wall taps for (5) Distilled Water and (6) Steam as well as a safety shower for when you spilled your work on yourself... There was once a time when I thought my greatest achievement was working in a lab hood for three weeks straight , weekends included - to produce 2.25 mg of a target molecule needed for a publication. LOL!
Dave 2021: It's shiny, shiny equals expensive.
me:"so true !!"
and 30 years ago, we carried several of them, around the world... For stage shows and performances... 20W was small, we had up to 100W.
The water cooling was the nasty bit, since it had to run at all times, every day in different venue - different fittings, drains and distances.
Plus I do remember having had huge transformers, beside the main PSU, huge = 200kg++.
100 W? Wow, great stuff! In the 90's, I used 30 W Ar+ and Kr+ ion lasers in a lab. We had 125 A / 400 V three-phase wall sockets and 2-inch power "cords" for it. 10 W lasers are in fact just for sissies... ;-)
@@tylerethernet8610 This was for shows like pyramids in Egypt and stuff. One brand was great on Krypton (I think Spectraphysics) and the other one on Argon, where the Argons where the power houses.
I do remember how one flight case with tube, just about fit the length of a 3.5t box truck.
@@SarahKchannel We too had Spectra Physics (Ar+) and one Coherent (Kr+) lasers. The latter one sucked a bit (not just electricity) and was acting up once in a while, including its power supply. Ar+ indeed lases very powerfully and was fun to work with.
Yes, I had the opportunity to get the transformer with this, but it was several hundred kg and on a shipping pallet.
@@EEVblog yep because this things run predominantly 110V and single phase on the PSU... so we always had 240/380V 3LNPE to 110V 1LNPE transformers...
packing and unpacking on a daily basis.
But I still sometimes miss those days !
The thing you thought was the powermeter is actually a selenoid. Larger argon tubes have a built in refill reservoir since some of the gases get embedded into the tube so the pressure drops over time. The attached tube is pinched off on one and and contains some gas that can be added by sequentally opening the two valves, every time giving a small pulse of gas until the reservoir is depleted and the tube needs a complete refill.
But those valves often leak just a little, rising the gas pressure over time of non use, up to the point where the tube can't be ignited anymore.
There is a sweet spot of hours/day to get the maximum life out of a tube.
@@VintageTechFan Either they leak or you dont know what they are and play with them. Not like i ever ruined a perfectly usable I90 tube when i was a kid....
@@NIOC630 We have an Innova 400 "Sabre" at work, but don't use it all the time. At idle times, we have to regulary run it to keep the gas pressure from rising too high.
In the smaller Version (4w if I remember correctly), they don't use a vale, instad there are four glas ampules inside soft copper tubes. To refill you just crush the tube with something.
@@philipweser8774 Yes, im not entirely sure but i think i have one like that somewhere....
The tube thingie over the brewster window is to keep dust out. High power laser optics can be damaged by dust burning in the laser beam. This damages the glass optics/mirrors and causes them to further heat up and cause more damage by thermal runaway.
Just lick your finger and wipe it off. All good.
Yes indeed. Some argon-ion lasers (I don't know about that particular model) use a nitrogen gas purge for all parts of the beam path outside the actual laser tube, to prevent dust ingress and oxidization of the optical coatings. Bellows tubes like that are common, as the mirror mounts have to be free to tilt a bit to align them, so you can't use a solid tube.
The circulating optical power inside the cavity can be 100x the output power, so you don't want dust falling on a mirror that's reflecting 1000W of light in an area of a few mm^2.
@@theonetrueanthonylong1843 Nice try, Kent!
Yeah, but why does it look like that with o-rings on the outside.
@@EEVblog Maybe it's done that way so you can attach it after assembly... you squeeze the spring and you can put it and out afterwards as opposed to having a tube?
Hey Dave, nice taredown. I believe we used to pull the six strongest lines out of this one, but because it doesn't have krypton there are no red/orange lines. But plenty of lines in the blue green and violet range. The main beam with all the lines has a greenish cyan colour, that any ion laser user will remember. That rear mirror adjustment is super sensitive, the difference between output and no output at all from memory. I believ that the output mirror and the rear mirror are specially formulated dichroic mirrors to optimise the lines that the laser was designed to produce which is why they don't look as reflective as you would imagine. But they certainly are in the frequencies desired. Cheers Dave.
Thanks Daryl for donating the gear, very enjoyable and interesting downdowns.
The AvE label makes this worth twice as much and also twice as exciting.
When they were getting it calibrated do you think they muttered "focus you ffffuck"?
I hate that dang sticker, always excluding me from the fun! lol
"Let's see how she chooches!"
@@BenHeckHacks them is lot of pixies in there .
One of the first things I noticed ! ! !
Thanks for sharing, spent many hours re-tubing Kryton (413nm) Innova laser heads in a previous job, used for CD/DVD mastering equipment as a light source. Kept the system service eeprom and service manual to repair heads/PSU, as was certified by Coherent many years ago. The device you highlighted as monitor diode is actually Ar or Kr Gas reservoir. Which will add gas as pressure deviates from ideal based on tube voltage. Noble gasses become trapped under sputtered Cu inside the plasma tube, which lowers the pressure. The AlO ceramic plasma tube has dozen's of Cu cups which have a holes where the narrow confined plasma passes thru. This sputtering eventually leads to lowering of the output power as the sputtered by products deposit on the back of the brewster windows. In our application the tubes only had a 6-8k hours life on time and cost >$20k. Fascinating technology (wasteful) to generate less than 1 W output @ 413nm!
They use Invar rods between the mirrors for stable lasing. The optical cavity length (distance between the mirrors) must be a fixed number of wavelengths at the resonant frequency, so obvs if the cavity length changes it buggers up the output.
That tube is a multiline version as it has 2 brewster windows, so the exact multiple of the output wavelength thing isn't true for this particular laser. It would be the case for an SLM version of course.
@@cambridgemart2075 Do the single-line versions have the intra-cavity wavelength-selection prism _instead_ of the rear Brewster window? (I don't remember the details after 20+ years).
@@cambridgemart2075 - thanks. My memory's fading.
@@tylerethernet8610 I believe they do, I don't think these lasers used an etalon unless single longitudinal mode is required.
@@cambridgemart2075 We had single-line the version with _may_ have employed a prism (IIRC) and/or an etalon. It didn't matter that much, anyway, as we were just pumping ring lasers with them.
Dave, you just took me back to uni days with Brewsters Angle, I’d have to go back over notes and lectures I’ve still got to remember it all again! Thanks for the trip down memory lane 😊
The flexible metal tube is to seal light in and dust out and take up thermal expansion.
Take a drink every time he says "for those following along at home"
And five if he ever says "beauty" without shortly thereafter saying "forever."
or "choob"
The multi-line argon lasers have gorgeous beam colours.
especially when split up by a prism :-)
I've actually got one (a much smaller, 40mW laser) and it's quite a sight to behold.
Fun watching you try to figure out all the parts in there, it's always a good time being exposed to something new, even if it's something old. This brought back fond memories of spending hours pouring through Sam's Laser FAQ, interacting with some super smart laser physicists and technicians online and messing with and building all sorts of lasers as a hobbyist.
You now just need the freaking shark to attach it to!
_Fricking_ shark. Don't get the species mixed up.
Sir, your channel content and information delivery is unique..
I must say, it is very pragmatic... thanks for everything you do for your followers....🙏🙏🙏
From India
Very amazing Laser! Thank’s for the teardown!
Awesome teardown, thanks for sharing!
I have an HeNe laser with that polarizing angled window. I’ve noticed that you get a beam that comes out almost perpendicular to the main beam. I’m guessing the metal spring is there to absorb the stray beam and dissipate the heat from that
Thats correct, this beam has orthogonal polarization direction of lesser power. But you still dont want that to go out in case someone works on it.
That makes sense, thanks.
Invar was also used for Synchronome master clock pendulums due to its excellent low expansion characteristics.
I used the bigger brother of this for my masters but for the phd follow up we replaced it with a diode pumped solid state laser. much more efficient. 56kW for 32 W laser light (all lines) or 12-15 W single line. The brewster window has to be covered as this is within the laser cavity (those end at the mirrors) and thus the laser power there is much higher and it will burn in any dust quickly. And we had a service contract with coherent as the tube needed to be replaced about every two years. Once the service techincian tried to bring it back to spec by cleaning the brewster window with an acid, but then it was even worse and they had to replace it eiitherway. Nice to see it again.
I need to find an excuse to use "polychromatic acousto-optical modulator" in conversation now.
We had some devices that looked a lot like this in the first research laser printers. A decade or so earlier, used an invar pendulum to precisely measure the local value of G, the gravitational "constant."
When we see such massive things, what we expect to hear:
Photonicinduction: "Let's fire it up!"
EEVblog: "Let's tear it down!"
And of course at the end of the Photonicinduction video: “I popppped it!”
Those invar rods....WOW that's neat! Reminds me of the CRT days. Sony had invar shadow masks in the Trinitron CRTs. Very low thermal expansion to reduce convergence errors as a tube heated up. Then there were the NEC monitors that used aperture grilles where if you smacked the monitor on the side, you'd see convergence go nuts for a second as the wires vibrated.
Love the mix of mechanical and electronic. I actually think you could do a part 2. Cheers Dave
how many charged caps have you thrown at others since we last met?
@@lordjaashin None that was in my younger years. If your a patreon Clive has a few new vids out. :)
Very good descriptions/info, Thanks!
In the 90s I did amateur laser shows for my Brother's band. Started with a red he-ne tube, later got my hands on a blue + green argon that was only a few watts. Then had a super rare, beautiful deep purple helium-cadmium laser. This had a more complicated separate power supply unit than the Argon, and on startup a big fat tungsten filament started glowing brightly to vaporize the cadmium before it would fire the gas discharge supply. Both of these lasers were temperamental as hell, with the mirrors going out of alignment and requiring long warm up times before they really started humping. These cost well into five figures new, and the salvage guy I knew was selling them for 1500+ used with thousands of hours on the meter. Nowadays, diode lasers are available up into the UV range and lasers comparable to these gas giants are cheap as sand in comparison.
You will need the "safety squint" sign as well to operate it.
Great video!!!!
I love the warning sticker on the side. It needs to be applied to more gear.
IT NEEDS TO BE IN THE MERCH STORE
@@martinkuliza it's available on AvE's merch.
AvE made them and sells them on his Esty, "AvEwerkz"
@@Zipppyart
thanks , i'll be sure to get a few
There's no filament at the anode end, it's just a block of tungsten embedded in copper.
The I300 series have a personality module which is on that PCB in the head, it talks to the PSU to supply the stored configuration data for the individual tube.
The water flows in at the cathode end and out at the anode end as that's the hottest part; that's why the thermostat is at the anode end.
The filament feedback lines are fused because the filament runs at 50 to 60A, you wouldn't want a short on the feedback lines as it would cause them to glow if they weren't fused!
Did I say that? If so, yeah, obviously no filament.
"if we need that extra push over the cliff, you know what we do?"
"Put it up to eleven."
I'm only guessing but the flexy tube on the Brewster window provides protection from dust etc while allowing adjustment of the output mirror.
Well that's a new one for me. Love the video man
what a beast! cheers Dave
that springy tube thing.. looks like ya cant actually see through the "coil" it would block any light that is scattered off the output lens..ya dont get 100% pass straight through some is scattered off at right angles.. ...its extra eye protection...the o-rings probably go through to the middle ..for grip on the shaft when mounting....
11!
My car is red so it goes faster!!!
You know there are people out there at that level.
Blank face. What do you do?
11! = 39916800
@@nndorconnetnz Well cars used to have go faster stripes, made it faster and sportier apparently.
We had several Coherent lasers that were purchased as scrap.
We never did get them working in spite of pumping one down to vacuum again and having a 3 phase supply on hand!
(One was Spectra Physics)
I love the AVE style warning label!
I can't get over the AvE / EEVBlog crossover
BTW in old IBM printing machines we have had about same size lasers. Those where those printers where paper rushes true the few machines. Laser would polarize letters onto the drums and drums would pick up toners with that charge and press it and baked it on the paper. Drums were hot to.
16:52 I am certan that this is for decoupling the laser from the housing as a flex joint.
And also looks to be dustproof since if you get a little dust on it thet absorbs light it will heat up and burn/crack the light output glass puncturing the whole tube.
Coherent, were competitors of Specra-Physics, both in the Silicon Valley, California. They also made mixed-gas Argon/Krypton that outputted a 'white' output. Cool stuff.
Love the AVE Sticker!
Good video. I'm one of the manufacturing engineers at Coherent for the Ion laser product line.
The O-ring bellow contain some platinum catalyst to break down the Ozone generate from the plasma - also it is to keep the Brewster super clean
Discovered the Midas touch while building the XR2206 function generator.. touching around the circuit(on safe circuit) and if it works(the pin on the peaks go away) you measure the capacitance of your finger the distance of the contacts.. so I installed a 201 cap between the frequency and amplitude pin and its gone with no distortion.. We have Muncing.. Now we also jave the Midas touch...
At my college, the physics dept. had a LASER that as far as I know was only fired up on parents day.
I don't remember what class of LASER it was, but it had big warning signs that said "Warning Danger of Decapitation".
It burned holes though firebricks very quickly - what fun.
Teardown argon laser - thumbnail shows red beam. I started working at Spectra Physics in 1978 on lasers, good times!
Hey Pat, I’m actually working on two SP-124 lasers that are still working (in some ways ;).
Maybe it just keeps the dust off the aperture and in general prevents random diffractions into the surrounding case.
Oh man, Dave...you gotta turn it on for us!
"If you let all the vacuumie out, THEN.... Your laser don't work so good anymore!" - EEVblog
Fact.
@@EEVblog *EEVblog* I'll never forget the video you made from 2009 about audiophools and snake oil! By the way, how's it going in Australia with the lockdowns? ;-)
It's a older version of the Folkys Laminar Derivative Drive Induction Prohibitor. Obviously it's not the best way to do it but back then it was harder to distinguish when G prime G' would transition or spring to G double prime G".
Great use for the AvE sticker!
Styro Pyro would be drooling over this laser
Thoroughly interesting enlightening entertaining stuff you are talking about that I got no idea about what you're saying. but I always like watching your videos anyway because of your joy la vivre and the little bits of stuff I do learn I suppose.
What a timing to open YT. Giant ass Argon LAZER? SIGN ME UP!
I have a really old one that runs on 3 phase power and is water cooled. Power supply is 220 and takes a key to come on. I started to tear it down to rebuild as a laser turret but it sat for decades and bolts are really in there.
Holy moly I remember using those, one argon for 488 and 515nm and one for 658nm red krypton. Beams all mixed together with dicro mirrors then piped into a PCAOM. Eventually got a set of yellow green optics for the 560ish line of krypton. Yup they make great space heaters if it's chilly where you are doing the show if you use a water to air heat exchanger. Built my own using automotive radiators and the cooling fans. Because 480V 3 phase at 50A per phase and plumbed water is a horrifying combination. Early 2000s. Also the lasers cost about as much as a new car when they were new. None of mine were new though. The assembly you thought was a photodiode is the gas replenishing module. A valve that dumps the argon into the tube as it gets buried. I disconnected those as the psu would fire it too much if it thought the tube was too low on voltage or no reason at all. All that white ceramic is beryllium oxide as well. I modified these heads to run on SP 451 exciters as well. Kilowatts for miliwatts. 😂
On my engraver Laser there is a LED that uses like 30 Watt's and outputs 7.5 Watt optical. Times have changed. Sure you can't get same wave lengths and can't do same things but still efficiency is awesome. There is also a model with two of those diodes and it has limited optical power of 12,5 Watt and uses 40 Watt. Have had to correct numbers I have checked them up.
The Ave sticker is more appropriate than ever ....
This is what I'm waiting for 😤
Also, on these models, if the “Laser Radiation “ light is out, the system will not start, thought of switching out mine with an LED, instead of a filament, and found that it measures the current thru the existing lamp, to verify that it is on, for a safety factor. No indicator light, no Lase!!🤗 page 6-1
Photo output sensor is that black sensor at front of Laser Mirror too with a beam splitter that you unscrewed at beginning.
Bellows for keeping Dust out of optics.
Also inner jacket is water cool for plasma tube, outer jacket is for the Magnet cooling. You can change output mirrors to other nm, to select light frequencies
Excellent Tear down!!
"No Mr Bond, I expect you to die" lol
Let’s do a gofundme campaign to have this sent to Ben @Applied Science. He will surely make good use of it for the benefit of us all! Thanks for the great video Dave!
The photodiode is on the front. The metal bellow is a dust cover. Some of the thick wires are for the electromagnet
Damn that's a power hungry beast! Still very cool 😬
Love the sticker. I wonder where that came from... perhaps somewhere in Canada?
I love that clip of the amplifier lol
A movie scene comes to mind here. "Find out why these red lights go back and forth" - William Shatner, Airplane 2
Loved the amp hour podcast, I recommend listening to it! Just a note/question... why make the beam in the thumbnail edited to be red when they make a more cyan color at the 488 peak or green at the 514nm peak usually?
The metal tube is probably just an off the shelf metal hi-vac flex hose, but it's job in the laser is to keep the dust and moister off the optics. You don't want to fire up a laser with dirty optics.
Ion lasers are awesome, I need to own more of them eventually!
@EEVblog I am 100% down to chat on an amp hour episode, I have plenty of optical knowledge and anecdotes!
That's a whole new level when it comes to low efficiency, LOL! But cool and interesting laser anyway
Thought you were in the TV for a sec lol
Great opening scene, very funny. I'm looking forward to seeing it operating. Maybe you can bounce it off the mirror on the moon.
remarkably efficient heater, also emits some light for strange reasons .)
Interesting. But why didn't you tear it down completely? I was hoping to get all the cooling system goodness and a look at the plasma tube. Detail shot of the board. Inside of the main monitor diode.
Fun fact, the lighting console that Spinal Tap toured with (in reality) had all of its faders relabeled to go to 11. I assume they did the same for their audio gear, but I did not see any of that.
Gotta love Spinal Tap. Thanks for the teardown - took me back a looooong way.
spec of dust on that dither optic I think, careful with taking those apart without a filter cabinet when it gets to higher levels
I like your warning label. :-)
Super cool!
The device on the small tube that you called a diode looks like a double-acting solenoid valve. I've seen similar ones on some of the smaller equipment in our lab.
Yes, someone mentioned that bove in the comments, the tube on the other end contains gas.
Some CRTs used an Invar shadow mask to stop them from changing shape with heat.
Also, those electromagnets look like they're been used for the Faraday effect, which can affect polarization of light in some materials.
Ben from Applied Science has a video about it.
I once had a TV with an invar shadow mask, but it was in fact the only TV I ever had that showed problems due to shadow mask heating.
It was one of those "flat square" jobbies with a large diagonal, probably that first introduced the problem that they then tried to counteract with the invar mask.
However it still showed color patches after it had displayed bright white for a couple of seconds, sometimes visible during normal programming.
Would've loved if you screwed more stuff off to take a look at. Something like the emitter diode.
Dave you've got to make some stickers out of the video thumbnail!!
I got a small unknown Argon Laser from eBay for cheap like 15 years ago. It had 150mW 448nm for about 850W input... I don't want to sound like "audiofool" but it was beautiful compared to those 445nm diode rubbish ;)
Those rubber ring spring thingies are just there to prevent dust burning on the optics I think
That laser is still more efficient than the solar roadways.
These are the companies no one knows but everyone loves
The two " magnet" are actually actuator base on magnetostriction - use to stabilize pointing and power drift
Ah, so it has PowerTrack? Was wondering that, since IIRC that always was an optional feature.
But of course very useful for a mostly unattended show laser application.
.. okay have seen it, was a temporary lapse of attention.
I had a 1 watt air-cooled argon in the 90's. It took over 700 watts and ran HOT.
So a 700W fan heater with a 1W laser.
"Chargin' mah lazers, shoop da whoop"
is the rigid metal tube around the photo diode leads just a current guard to stop leakage from the hi voltage lines before it gets back to the TIA? ... cannot think what that big tube would be though ?
point of note: argon lasers don't have red beams. they lase with blue and green lines with 488nm (cyan) being the predominant wavelength. it's all dependent on the optics, but you'll never get red.
I love the AvE sticker on it.
I wonder why both of the ends look crooked, like visibly out of alignment. The output end, that metal spring/fin thing that goes over the Brewster window seems to need the springyness because it is like the axes do not align. And the back end, those white plastic tubes seem to be at different angles!
I would think those mirror adjustment screws are 'differential screws' - 2 screw threads in one, cancelling each other out. One screw thread has a thread width (pitch) that is just a little bit different than the other one, thus the cancellation is just a tiny bit off. And so, one rotation of the screw results in a tiny displacement.
(then again, you could see quite a displacement as Dave turned one of those screws...so I'm not sure)
What a complex evil thingy. I remember those were expensive as a sports car back then.
Is there a chance you can get this one to run - or is it a museum artefact?
A very expensive sports car at that!
Nope. The PSU is gone, and it needed a 24kW supply.
@@EEVblog Also after it sitting for so long, most likely the tube is dead. New tube has a 5 digits pricetag for sure.
Perhaps a brief mention of the idea of a population inversion might be mentioned....It is true the internal multiple reflections of the beam inside the laser and the subsequent interaction of the beam with the lasing medium results in an amplification of the beam, but that in turns relies upon the population inversion in the lasing medium...
they gave you that old one. How different would be the new one they replaced it with?