Fiber-coupled three-micron pulsed laser source for CFRP laser treatment

We present a laser source providing up to 18 W and 1.5 mJ at a wavelength of 3 mm. The output is generated by frequency conversion of randomly polarized multimode radiation at 1064 nm of an Nd:YAG laser in a two-stage conversion setup. The frequency converter comprises an optical parametric oscillator and a subsequent optical parametric amplifier using PPLN as nonlinear medium in both stages. To implement fiber-based beam delivery for materials processing, we coupled the output at 3 mm to a multimode ZrF4-fiber. This source was then used to remove epoxy resin from the surface of CFRP samples.