I’m seeing people with diodes failing and thought I’d make a video showing what I’ve already described in my hack segment. ie how air flows out of the heatsink fins and doesn’t cool the diode which resides near the bottom of the heatsink.
I made a flag to show airflow and a video of that. Take away what you will but my belief is that putting a simple sticker/tape/etc on the side of the laser diode heatsink will improve cooling and help lengthen the life of the laser diode.
FWIW, I used a cheap($150)thermal imaging camera and checked the heatsink temp without the shields running at 80% power and then tested it with the full length shields at the same power rating and for the same duration. I saw no difference in temperature.
I will try the test again but this time I will use shorter side shields, more like the sticker on the front.
2" wide blue painters tape on the sides starting at the bottom edge of the fan seemed to help but only very slightly. It hardly saw 90degF after 20% of my test file and when I cut the blue tape down so it was the same length as the front “Danger” sticker the temp again hit 90degF and pretty much stayed there.
This really surprises me because with the thermal imaging camera I can see that the lower half of the heatsink is where all the heat is so most of the heatsink in the top half does very little. That too is shown in the thermal imaging camera as the temps stayed in the low 80s while the bottom was at 90degF. This also explains why I’ve seen more powerful diode lasers(real 7W) with 1/2 the heatsink.
@Justin-Ortur This might be of interest to Ortur. A thermal imaging camera shows that most of the heating is happening down in the lower half of the heatsink since the diode itself resides in the lower 1/4th.
Maybe you guys can put some Ortur branding stickers on the left and right side of the heatsink being about the same size/length as the “Danger” sticker on the front?
Doug