Beam profile analyzer for CO2 lasers

The development of an optoelectronic system to analyze the beam intensity profile of CO2 lasers is presented herein. The device collects the beam profile with a LiTaO3 pyroelectric detector and uses a sampling technique based on the acquisition of horizontal sections at different levels. The digital signal processing includes subroutines that drop down two dimensional and three dimensional beam profile displays to determine the laser beam parameters of optical power, peak pixel location, centroid location and width of the laser beam, with algorithms based on the ISO 11146 standard. With the systematic calibration of the analyzer was obtained in the measurement of power an error under 5%, for a 20–200 W range and an error under 1.6% for spatial measurements of a TEM00 laser. By design, the analyzer can be used during the laser process.