Robert Walker, Deputy Secretary of the Defense Department, believes that the core of the third “offset strategy” is to establish an advantage in precision-guided weapons to successfully evade enemy precision-guided attacks while destroying the enemy. Many military experts also believe that tactical laser weapons are obviously the key development items in the third “offset strategy.”
Can 20,000 watt fiber lasers be used in the military? So, can the 20,000 watt (20KW) fiber laser developed in China be used in the development of tactical laser weapons in China? There is still some distance. First of all, one of the key components of fiber laser weapons is a single-mode fiber laser. Its representative is the 10KW single-mode fiber laser pointer produced by the Optical Company. In addition to being widely used by civilians, it is also widely purchased as a basic module for tactical laser weapons.
As mentioned above, most of the tactical laser weapons being developed and tested use this product of IPG. After the company first developed a 10KW single-mode fiber laser in 2009, it did not hide its strong interest in the weapons market. The 20KW fiber laser developed by Ruike Fiber Laser in Wuhan, China should still be a multimode fiber laser. From a technical perspective, high-power fiber laser pointers are divided into single-mode and multi-mode. It should be far easier to combine several low-power single-mode fiber lasers into a kilowatt-level output than a kilowatt-level single-mode output. Previously, the largest multimode fiber laser developed by the company was 4KW.
It is also difficult for the world’s leading IPG companies to increase single-mode fiber lasers to 20KW. The technical community generally believes that the upper limit of single-mode fiber lasers is 10KW. So in the field of tactical laser weapons, can high-power multimode fiber lasers replace the difficult single-mode fiber lasers? The answer is no. Although the power of the multimode laser is large, the beam quality is poor, so it cannot be applied to laser weapons, but can only be applied in the industrial field. Therefore, the main purpose of China’s 20,000 watt fiber laser is to break foreign monopolies, reduce import costs, and enable laser manufacturing technology to be more widely used in high-end manufacturing.
As early as at the Zhuhai Air Show in 2014, a Chinese company had already launched the “Low Altitude Guard 1” green laser pointer interception system, but after studying the system data, it was found that the output power of the system was 10KW, which was only Intercepting small and slow civilian drones cannot be used in the military’s tactical laser field.
However, China still has considerable confidence in developing a 10KW single-mode fiber laser similar to IPG. Driven by the company, China has initially realized a 100% domestic fiber laser industry chain. The founder of the main technology of IPG’s 10KW single-mode fiber laser, an American professor who has 24 international patents and the milestone invention patent of “double-clad fiber laser”, once visited Wuhan Ruike Company, and can have The localization and industrialization of fiber lasers with independent property rights was shocked and excited, and expressed willingness to cooperate with Raycus to promote its accelerated development.
Once a Chinese company can develop a 10KW single-mode fiber Laser Engraver, it will be able to develop a tactical laser weapon through incoherent synthesis almost immediately. The so-called “incoherent combining method” is to bundle multiple fiber lasers together in parallel and guide the output beams of these lasers in the same direction, so that they can be superimposed in space, thereby increasing the total power. A laser weapon under development was successfully developed through this method.