PicoLAS specializes in designing and manufacturing power supplies for diode lasers, often referred to as a key component. With over 10 years of experience, the company sees many markets and applications, for example, Time-of-Flight measurements, hair removal, sensing applications, laser welding and such.
In the medical market, PicoLAS sees an increase in using high power lasers for skin treatment like hair removal and anti-aging. We asked CEO Dr. Markus Bartram about their solution to overcome some of the most stringent power regulations in this domain.
“Let’s talk about hair removal as an example. You typically need a laser of 755 nm or 810 nm wavelength and a driver that delivers several kilowatts power and 5 to 100 ms pulse width (duration). This will generate a fluence (radiant energy) up to 40 J/cm2 of skin. The idea is to selectively burn the melanin in the hair shaft and damage the follicle, so the hair will not come back.
Typically, the average power consumption of hair removal systems like this is between 500 W and 1.5 kW, but there is one very important issue. Laser systems and power supplies in health care are governmental regulated. Zooming in on the power supply regulations, it cannot exceed leakage current of 500 microamps, for instance.
In principal, operating at the aforementioned power requirements, you would need a 5 – 6 kW medical approved AC-DC power supply. Today you can only find up to 1.5 kW available on the market. Alternatively, you could add a second power supply, but you would not pass the medical approvals: One AC-DC power supply has already a leakage current of around 400 microamps. Other solutions like DC-DC convertors require a lot of approvals.
At PicoLAS we have found a solution that we have not seen on the market before. We started from a 1 kW medical power supply and added a capacitor of around 50 mF. Packaged together with an intelligent power driver this is not overcharging the main power supply.
We can come up with solutions others cannot, because we have a lot of knowledge of our own drivers and experience from previous successes.
