Experiments on laser cleaning of sooted optical windows

摘要

To develop laser-ignition technology, transparent glass plates were artificially sooted and irradiated repetitively by laser from the front (sooted) and back sides separately. Generally, the back-side irradiation was more effective at soot removal. However, the deaning effect was saturated after thousands of laser shots. Although the saturated soot quantity was a decreasing function of the laser fluence per pulse, its magnitude remained the same for both front-side and back-side irradiations. In examining several soot-removal mechanisms proposed so far, it was found that the aerodynamic force produced by the flow induced by the laser heating of the soot was the most plausible mechanism. (C) 2018 Optical Society of America