A study on a CO2 gasdynamic laser by means of a shock tube employing a wedge nozzle to extract the laser power.

In a CO2 gasdynamic laser (CO2 GDL), output laser power is extracted by rapidly cooling preheated gases. There are several methods for getting hot gases. To carry out the present study, a simple shock tube was designed and employed. The shock tube is superior to other methods in the following ways: a molar fraction with high accuracy can be chosen; high purity of the test gas can be achieved; and the required pressure can be obtained rather easily; so the shock tube technique is suitable for obtaining basic experimental data. In this paper, nine types of nozzles are employed and the gasdynamic characteristics on CO2 GDL are investigated.