
120,000 W Ytterbium fiber laser commercially available, runs on 480V - anonsivalley652
https://www.ipgphotonics.com/en/products/lasers/high-power-cw-fiber-lasers/1-micron/yls-1-120-kw#%5Byls-up-to-500-kw%5D
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simonblack
Note that they're talking _watts_ not _joules_. That implies continuous
output, or heavy duty-cycle output.

At 480V, that's 250 Amps. That's a very heavy-duty current, and necessitates
very heavy conductors to reduce the resistance as much as possible.

Wouldn't it be better to use a higher voltage and allow for the use of a lower
current, and not so massive conductors?

~~~
gus_massa
There are many models and I'm not an expert so I'm not sure which type they
are using. But note that the usual number of kilowatts is for the power during
the peak. For example from:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q-switching#Typical_performanc...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q-switching#Typical_performance)

> _Typical performance_

> _A typical Q-switched laser (e.g. a Nd:YAG laser) with a resonator length of
> e.g. 10 cm can produce light pulses of several tens of nanoseconds duration.
> Even when the average power is well below 1 W, the peak power can be many
> kilowatts. Large-scale laser systems can produce Q-switched pulses with
> energies of many joules and peak powers in the gigawatt region. On the other
> hand, passively Q-switched microchip lasers (with very short resonators)
> have generated pulses with durations far below one nanosecond and pulse
> repetition rates from hundreds of hertz to several megahertz (MHz)._

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anonsivalley652
(Meta: HN wouldn't let me write "120 kW.")

I have no idea if this marketing wank or not, but it seems plausible and
investigable with some due-diligence.

~~~
gus_massa
I think it's a pulsed laser, but I can't find a good sentence to quote in the
website.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulsed_laser](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulsed_laser)

They are "off" most of the time accumulating energy, and then they send a very
high power pulse, so the average power is not so high. The on-off switch is
many times per second.

In some applications it is more important the maximal power than the average
power.

[About the title: It's probably a false positive in the automatic filter to
prevent spam and linkbait, sometimes it's too strict. You can use the "edit"
link below the title to fix it. If that fails, you can send an email to the
mods hn@ycombinator.com so they fix it. Anyway, it would be a good idea to
send the mail so they fix the automatic filter.]

~~~
simonblack
_They are "off" most of the time accumulating energy, and then they send a
very high power pulse, so the average power is not so high._

They are talking _kilowatts_ , not _joules_ , so the average power is very
high. To get that sort of average power, any pulses must either be quite long
or extremely powerful.

~~~
anonsivalley652
The datasheet claimed 100% duty cycle CW depending entirely on chilled water
capacity. I think the military weaponized one are pulsed in the same average
energy range, but have a much higher impulse that causes destruction of
targets. So the commercial CW ones can cut a steel plate at a certain rate,
but the military pulsed ones would obliterate a target.

