Posted: 11/15/2009 6:44:50 PM EDT
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Would I need to be able to melt/burn a hole into your average road tire form no less that 2 car lenghts away?
This is purely a hypothetical. 
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I dont know for sure what would do it, but I have played some with a friends 20W CO2 laser, and it would not do it. the 20W would melt candlewax and char wood in a small spot almost instantly at a couple of feet, and would break glass given a few minutes on the same spot.
It is hard to quantify ability to burn shit up, but I would say this laser was about on par with a good 4" glass magnifying glass on a sunny day. To put a hole in a tire from 20', I am guessing an order of magnitude more, so something in the couple hundred watt range? (note that this laser did not have any focusing optics at this point, so that might also make a difference...) |
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The term YAG laser is usually used for solid-state lasers based on neodymium-doped YAG (Nd:YAG, more precisely Nd3+:YAG), although there are other rare-earth-doped YAG crystals, e.g. with ytterbium, erbium, thulium or holmium doping (see below). YAG is the acronym for yttrium aluminum garnet (Y3Al5O12), a synthetic crystal material which became popular in the form of laser crystals in the 1960s. Yttrium ions in YAG can be replaced with laser-active rare earth ions without strongly affecting the lattice structure, because these ions have a similar size. YAG is a host medium with favorable properties, particularly for high-power lasers and Q-switched lasers emitting at 1064 nm. YAG lasers are in many cases bulk lasers made from discrete optical elements. However, there are also monolithic YAG lasers, e.g. microchip lasers and nonplanar ring oscillators. Edit to add: I don't think you can buy one with the power output you need, you could however, modify one. |
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Would I need to be able to melt/burn a hole into your average road tire form no less that 2 car lenghts away? This is purely a hypothetical. I think I understand your thought process and why you feel such a device might be useful in the real world.....unfortunately I don't believe a laser with the power to accomplish your goal is available in a form that would be useable, concealable in a car and sturdy enough to last for any length of time. Yet...... 
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| look up ssy1 on ebay or search sams laser faq linky has tons of info about the diff types and how to build them and the parts that are out there. |
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IMO, you'd need at least a killowatt, assuming you had the ideal wavelength for carbon infused vulcanized rubber, and then it would probably need an intelligent vision system that can time the rpm of the target tire so a pulsed laser can repeatedly hit the same spot. Although assuming you're some kind of DIY genius, creating that vision system, or even some kind of best guess system that's based on speed of your car, or the target car and known common wheel diameters would be easier than getting the extra wattage, or the power supply to run it.
If you wanted to do it in a single burn, I'd up that to 10 kilowatts at least. The saving grace is that you don't have to get through the steel belts, kevlar, etc. to cause a failure, you just have to let the air out. So maybe you could "stitch" the sidewall, and cause a flat.
Right now, what you're dreaming of is do-able, in a truck-sized platform, but with a multi-million dollar R&D team of defense engineers. IMO, someone with a bunch of CO2 surplus tubes and a real healthy dose of genius could probably achieve the needed wattage, but getting the optical tracking, the beam combining etc. adaptive optics etc. in a system robust enough to work in a moving vehicle just isn't going to happen in someone's garage. |
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while rotating? electrically or chemically powered? Parked or at a stop light..... for now. What ever is eaiser to fit on a compact size car. I think it would be the other way around... You need to find a laser on a truck, and then duct tape your car to that truck. ie...the laser and all of its accessories would be pretty big. |
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When I was in school for this stuff in the early 80s, we had to take a safety course, and during this safety course, we watched a video that had a man cut in two because he walked past the beam of a Nd Yag. It cut him in to two pieces, and cauterized the wounds, so there was no blood. Freaked the nurse out. This was a hospital laser that was 8' long, by 2' wide and 2' high, not including the power supply. I think with a little ingenuity it could be done. |
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You may want to use an infra-red laser with an invisible beam. Visible light laser do not put out the power to do any serious damage, except to exposed eyes. I've seen things lit on fire with a pretty low-powered green laser. Visible or not doesn't matter a whole lot, as long as the target is opaque to the given wavelength, and hence, absorbs the energy. A tire, being black, will absorb visible light just fine. A magnifying glass in the sun will show you that. To go through a tire in the time the guy sits at a stop light, it would take a fair amount of power. That means a pretty decent-sized laser, and to keep it small enough for a car, you're talking liquid cooling. Lasers are also terribly inefficient, if you want 100 watts of actual energy out of the thing, you'd probably have to put in a kilowatt at a bare minimum, and several kilowatts is more likely, so you'd have to plan on an extra battery bank as well. All in all, it would be possible, but large, time-consuming, difficult, and expensive. Why not go for a softer target, and reduce the needed power by a couple orders of magnitude... aim for the valve stem. Just be sure not to reflect the laser off of their chrome wheels back into your eyes. 
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A 120mw green laser will SLOWLY burn through black plastic and things, at a room length away if held steady enough.
In order to do it relatively quick you will need something in the 500mw (half watt) or higher range, and even then any movement in the tire, or any shaking will stop it. http://www.laserglow.com/int-handheld.htm For visible green, you are looking at a 500 Mw max. For IR (infrared) you can go much higher in the wattage range, but be advised, even a slight glance into an IR laser this powerful can PERMANENTLY blind you!!! (or anyone else unfortunate enough to get hit by it) Green will do the same, but at least you can see the beam enough to avoid it. The Scorpius-D is a 2000 mw (2 Watt)IR (infrared) handheld laser. 
Be prepared to spend several thousand dollars on one of those puppies. They use D-cell batteries
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Quoted: nd yag laser But you'll never fit the necesary YAG setup in your car....TRUST ME. You are talking about a several tons of gear, controllers, chillers, etc. Too, the yag rod, the water crystal, the shutter assembly and ALLLL of the other components could not take jostleing around in a car... |
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Brilliant.....hope he wears laser glasses...... VERY, VERY cool setup.....an inustrial style laser on a very, very teeny scale.....but COOL!!! |
