PROCEEDINGS ARTICLE | November 16, 2010
Proc. SPIE. 7751, XVIII International Symposium on Gas Flow, Chemical Lasers, and High-Power Lasers
KEYWORDS: Mirrors, Data modeling, Resonators, Chemical species, 3D modeling, Oxygen, Throat, Iodine, Chemical lasers, Chemical oxygen iodine lasers
The kinetics of the chemical oxygen-iodine laser (COIL) has been studied alongside the technological efforts in COIL
development. In particular, many efforts have been devoted to the study of the mechanism of I<sub>2</sub> dissociation in the COIL
medium. Since O<sub>2</sub>(a) is the energy reservoir of the COIL, it must be involved in the dissociation of I<sub>2</sub>. Therefore,
understanding the dissociation mechanism may help in finding ways of minimizing the O<sub>2</sub>(a) consumption for
dissociation and increasing the chemical efficiency of the laser. In the present paper previously suggested mechanisms
of I<sub>2</sub> dissociation are briefly overviewed and recent measurements and modeling of the gain and the power in supersonic
COILs carried out in our laboratory are presented. Our studies employ both an analytical model and numerical
calculations which are outlined in the present paper, with more details on the models given in a following paper by
Barmashenko et al. To unravel the I<sub>2</sub> dissociation mechanism we utilize kinetic-fluid dynamics three-dimensional
modeling, where pathways involving the excited species I<sub>2</sub>(X, 10 ≤ v < 25), I<sub>2</sub>(X, 25 ≤ v ≤ 47), I<sub>2</sub>(A, A'), O<sub>2</sub>(X, v), O<sub>2</sub>(a,
v), O<sub>2</sub>(b, v) and I(<sup>2</sup>P<sub>1/2</sub>) as intermediate reactants are included. Both the gain and the power studies show good agreement
between calculations and experiments. We believe that future modeling should include the above pathways and
additional pathways should be considered when additional kinetic data is available.
