A new method for improving the efficiency of laser drilling has been developed. Two synchronized free-running laser pulses from a tandem-head Nd:YAG laser are capable of drilling through 1/8-in-thick stainless-steel targets at a standoff distance of 1 m without gas-assist. The combination of a high-energy laser pulse for melting with a properly tailored high-intensity laser pulse for liquid exp...

We report initial NMR studies of (i) xenon gas diffusion in model heterogeneous porous media and (ii) continuous flow laser-polarized xenon gas. Both areas utilize the pulsed gradient spin-echo (PGSE) techniques in the gas phase, with the aim of obtaining more sophisticated information than just translational self-diffusion coefficients--a brief overview of this area is provided in the Introduc...

Laser beam cutting (LBC) is a most predominantly used non-traditional cutting process to cut desired shapes out of sheet metals, plates, sections and boxes with greater accuracy at least time. The criticality in this process is its complexity in cutting non ferrous materials due to their lesser absorption rate of the laser beam. Continuous wave CO2 laser and pulsed Nd:YAG laser are the most com...

We demonstrate a camera which can image methane gas at video rates, using only a single-pixel detector and structured illumination. The light source is an infrared laser diode operating at 1.651μm tuned to an absorption line of methane gas. The light is structured using an addressable micromirror array to pattern the laser output with a sequence of Hadamard masks. The resulting backscattered li...

Experiments of x-ray emission from Ar, Kr, and Ar/Kr gas jet mixture were performed at the UNR Leopard Laser Facility operated with 350 fs pulses at laser intensity of 2 × 1019 W/cm2 and 0.8 ns pulses at an intensity of 1016 W/cm2. Debris free x-ray source with supersonic linear nozzle generated clusters/ monomer jet with an average density of ≥1019 cm−3 was compared to cylindrical tube subsoni...

Considerable work has been done on the development of advanced process control for the Electric Arc Furnace (EAF) steelmaking process. Historically, many control systems have been employed which rely on static heat balance calculations coupled with power input profiles to generate recipe driven control models. Steelmakers have desired to have continuous information about the gases exiting the f...

Cutting efficiency and quality are very sensitive to gas jet pressure and nozzle standoff distance. Do a high gas pressure and a small standoff distance necessarily give better material removal capability and cutting quality? Simple experiments to measure the mass flow rate were carried out for two types of geometry: a circular hole and a linear cut directly underneath an axisymmetric nozzle. T...

We describe first the single mode output intensity of a Brewster windowed laser containing isotope mixtures when the cavity tuning is varied, and then the single mode output of a non-Brewster windowed laser under the influence of an axial magnetic field (Zeeman laser). We show how the central tuning (Lamb) dip in intensity gives way to more complicated tuning dependences such as a double dip. F...