Ophir Photonics Group has announced the StarBright laser power/energy meter, the most advanced of Ophir's family of laser meters.
StarBright is a feature-rich, handheld laser power/energy meter that measures power, single shot energy, repetitive energy, frequency, and beam size for the company's wide range of thermal, pyroelectric, and photodiode laser sensors. In addition, it measures irradiance and dosage for the new PD300RM radiometer sensors. When used with Ophir's award-winning BeamTrack power/position/size sensors, the new meter can also monitor laser beam size and track beam position to fractions of a millimetre.
StarBright features a brightly lit, 320x240 pixel color display with large, 16mm digits for enhanced readability of power and energy measurements, from pW's to kW's and pJ's to hundreds of Joules.
The meter works with StarLab laser measurement software and StarCom data logging software. A LabVIEW driver and COM object allow developers to integrate laser beam measurements into sophisticated programming environments, such as LabVIEW, Microsoft's Visual Basic, and MatLab StarBright's brightly lit display allows illumination of the power meter in low light conditions.
Ophir Photonics Group also announced the newest version of its non-contact beam monitoring system for high power lasers, BeamWatch.
BeamWatch is designed for very high power YAG, fibre, and diode lasers used in industrial material processing applications, such as welding and cutting operations in automotive, heavy equipment, and appliance manufacturing, or in oil & gas drilling. The new version features high magnification optics that measure beams with spot sizes down to 55µm. This allows for smaller, more precise cuts with less waste of material. BeamWatch also supports dual axis measurement, which lets users see the laser beam from two orthogonal axes. Measurements are calculated on each axis, providing detailed information about how the laser is operating. Focal shift can be tracked on both axes and the measurements can be used to determine the roundness of the beam or the presence of astigmatism.
Because there is no contact with the laser beam, BeamWatch has no power restrictions; it has been successfully used on high power lasers up to 100kW. Conventional beam measurement systems place a probe in the beam, causing potential damage and slowing the measurement process to as long as two minutes to gather data and characterize the beam. BeamWatch takes measurements every 60ms, providing instant readings of focus spot size and beam position, as well as dynamic measurements of focal plane location during process start-up.
BeamWatch monitors high power YAG, fibre, and diode lasers in the 980-1080nm range. The system measures key beam size, position, and quality parameters, including focus spot size, waist width, and beam propagation parameter (M2).
Ophir has also released three new high power laser sensors and scatter shield accessories designed for measuring large and divergent laser sources, such as diode stacks and arrays.
The 6000W-BB-200x200 is a very large aperture (200x200mm), water-cooled laser power/energy sensor able to measure from 100W to 6kW.
The L2000W-BB-120 is a large aperture (120mm), water-cooled laser power/energy sensor able to measure up to 2,000W. The L100(500)A-PF-120 is a large aperture (120mm) laser power/energy sensor for measuring single shot energy of large beams from high energy, short pulsed lasers.