Laser Hot End

I have several 40-80 watt 880 nm CW infrared lasers kicking around, fiber coupled, and capable of pulse width modulation. Has anyone ever tried a laser heated hot end? I'm not thinking of laser melting the filament itself at the nozzle, but dumping the laser output into a very small heat block, holding just the nozzle, platinum thin film sensor, and the laser fiber. The fiber is 0.8mm in diameter, or roughly half the diameter of a typical printing filament. It would be like asking the printer to move one more wire, while removing the two now going to the heater, and the heater itself.

Heat blocks are are as large as they are just to hold the resistive heater.

Thoughts, other than it's a very expensive way to hold a match to a nozzle? Best IR absorbent that will tolerate being threaded for the nozzle, etc., etc?

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/03/2022 05:52PM by rq3.

... yes, we (mostly me) were thinking about such "minimal-heaters" some 10+ years ago - then I had only IR-Laserdiodes with 9Watt@975nm out of a 0,1mm fiber ... but, beside some functional tests no big development then ... but was done some years later for fluid-jetting.

Now I have IR-Laserdiodes with up to 270W@975nm on a spot of 0,2mm diameter and actually reactivating some of my old stuff for a new project, I'm starting when changing to my new dayjob at 15. this month

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/03/2022 06:16PM by VDX.

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There was a paper in 2016 about a laser assisted hotend. At the time it was able to reach 1000mm/s when slapped on a relatively cheap i3 style clone. [arxiv.org]. [www.semanticscholar.org] has a couple figures. [www.youtube.com] has a demo video.