Northrop Grumman has a 105 kilowatt solid state laser


Northrop Grumman’s has a 105 kilowatt solid state laser. 100 kilowatts is considered the minimum for a battlefield laser

The achievements included turn-on time of less than one second and continuous operating time of five minutes, with very good efficiency and beam quality.

Jay Marmo, Northrop Grumman’s JHPSSL program manager, pointed out how the company’s scalable, building block approach also readily enables more challenging missions that require well above 100 kW of good beam quality laser power.

“Getting to 100 kW with replicated building blocks proves we can scale to these higher power levels if required for a given mission. This watershed development, coupled with our FIRESTRIKE(tm) laser ruggedization work, unequivocally demonstrates that Northrop Grumman is ready to bring high-power, solid state lasers to the defense of our deployed forces

The seven-chain JHPSSL laser demonstrator ran for more than five minutes, achieved electro-optical efficiency of 19.3 percent, reaching full power in less than 0.6 seconds, all with beam quality of better than 3.0.

“It is notable that we were able to meet the power demonstration goal with only seven laser chains, rather than the full eight chains we can accommodate. This shows the robustness of our industry-unique approach and the ability of our lasers to deliver predicted performance,” Marmo emphasized. “Adding the eighth chain will increase laser power to 120kW.”

RELATED NEWS
Boeing mounted one of its lasers on a Humvee and shot down a UAV.