Maintenance of the hottest CO2 laser lens

Maintenance of CO2 laser lens

in general power output lasers, all lenses mostly absorb specific laser wavelengths due to manufacturing process or external pollution and other factors, which over time shortens the service life of the lens, and sometimes affects the use or even downtime due to lens damage

the increase of laser wavelength absorption by the lens will cause uneven heating, which will lead to the reflection of the lens and the change of refractive index. When the laser wavelength passes through or reflects from the high absorption lens, the uneven distribution of laser power will make the central temperature of the lens high and the edge temperature low. This change is called lens effect in optics

due to the high absorption and heating of the lens caused by pollution, the lens effect will cause many problems. The generation of irreversible thermal stress in the lens substrate, the power loss caused by the beam propagation through the lens, the deflection of the focusing point position, and the premature damage of the coating layer can all lead to the destruction of the lens. For lenses exposed to the air, the programming is convenient, and the construction methods are also different. When we clean, we often do not follow the requirements and precautions for lens cleaning, and casually take materials, which will cause new pollution and even scratch the lens, causing irreparable losses. Therefore, based on years of experience, it is concluded that it is most important to keep any kind of optical lens clean. If you have good cleaning habits to carefully clean the lens, you can reduce or remove the pollution caused by human factors. Such as fingerprints and spittle flowers. As a common sense, when operating the optical system by hand, you should wear fingertips or medical gloves no matter cleaning, disassembly or installation, and always follow the requirements and precautions for cleaning the lens. In the cleaning process, only specified materials, such as optical lens wiping paper, cotton swabs and reagent grade ethanol, can be used. Taking shortcuts to the cleaning, disassembly and installation of any lens will shorten the service life of the lens, or even permanently damage it. Therefore, we should use common sense to prevent the lens from being polluted by other reasons, such as moisture, smoke, dust, etc. After determining the pollution of a certain lens, we should blow the lens with an ear ball until there are no particles on the utilization surface with improved material emission performance, as shown in Figure 2. Never blow it with your mouth. Because the blown air is gradually moving towards green development, most of the oil and water will further pollute the lens. If there is still pollution on the surface of the ear ball after treatment, we must gently wipe it with a special cotton swab dipped in laboratory grade acetone and ethanol. In this way, most of the contaminated thin layers can be removed. The pollution of the lens in the laser will cause serious acquisition errors to the laser output and even the data acquisition system. If we can keep the lens clean often, it will prolong the service life of the whole machine. (end)