After 3 and a half years, the BRIDLE project on high-brilliance industrial diode laser systems has concluded. The project brought together seven European industrial and academic partners who sought to harness the power and efficiency of diode lasers to develop an affordable direct diode laser source for industrial applications requiring the cutting and welding of sheet metal.
We hope that our last newsletter will make interesting reading (check Downloads on the website) and bring you up to date with the final project achievements. We also invite you to browse the BRIDLE website at: http://www.bridle.eu, where you can find more information about the project.
This is the last in our series of project e-Newsletters and I would like to thank you all for your continued readership.
Key Project Achievements
The BRIDLE project has seen many high quality developments and results across the breadth of the project. These have included:
- Highest ever efficiency from a tapered laser structure
- Highest ever lateral brilliance from broad area or ridge waveguide laser
- Best ever combination of BPP, efficiency and power from a monolithically-stabilised broad area laser
- Ridge WG laser arrays with individually-addressable emitters for CBC applications
- Individually-addressable high-power laser mounting solution, providing functionality for CBC applications
- Compact modules based on spectral beam combining with 46W output from a 0.2NA, 35µm core fibre
- Efficient 7:1 fibre combiner for power scaling laser modules with 35µm output fibres
- Highest power passive CBC diode array (7.5W)
- Investigations into effects of optical feedback on high-power, large optical cavity laser structures
- Multi-parameter optimisation for the design of lasers to be operated in an external cavity
- A CW modelling tool capable of modelling a laser diode operating in an external optical system
- The first fully self-consistent quasi-3D dynamic laser simulation tool
- Selective laser melting experiments successfully performed with fibre coupled BRIDLE modules
- BRIDLE system with 800W from a 100µm fibre, successfully used for cutting thin sheet metal
- Key supporter of the High Power Diode Lasers and Systems Conference in both 2013 and 2015