SBIR/STTR Award attributes
There have been many recent developments in the direct energy weapon space throughout the armed services, including the demonstration of the Navy’s Laser Weapons System (LaWS), the Army’s High Energy Laser Mobile Test Truck (HELMTT) and Mobile Expeditionary High Energy Laser (MEHEL) amongst others. Many of these systems (ex. LaWS) are based on a number of smaller fiber lasers spatially combined to produce higher output powers of 10 – 50 kW. The main drawback of these fiber lasers are low efficiency (20-30 percent), and poor beam quality due to the spatial combination. Forward Photonics’ proprietary wavelength beam combining technology (WBC) effectively solves this problem, by allowing for the combination of many distinct diode elements with a common output beam that has nearly the same beam characteristics as that of a single element. In Phase II of this program Forward Photonics will provide a laser subsystem that meets the requirements of a directed energy laser.
