I am patiently waiting for my electronics engineer to work out all the coding, communications, bunch of sensors, and laser drivers.
_
There are some updates regarding the phosphor wheel.
Here is some preliminary information:
100% of the industry uses phosphor wheels to obtain Red Green Blue for projectors. Selectively mixing R, G, and B will grant you almost all colors.
Blue lasers are extremely cost effective. They are high power, low cost, beam can be focused into much smaller spot compared to LEDs giving a high intensity.
Red and Green lasers are very expensive and has much lower power output.
Therefore, it would not be cost effective to use Blue lasers, Red lasers, and Green lasers in one projector.
In order to create a cost-effective product, the industry only sticks with using Blue lasers. The component that solves this issue are Phosphor Wheels. PW convert the blue laser light into a large spectrum of light ranging from yellow to red.
By using a dichroic filter, it is possible to split this yellowish light into separate green and red channels. Now that we have Blue (from laser) Green and Red (from PW) we have the necessary colors to produce a projector.
Here are some examples:
However,
In my case however, I do NOT need RGB channels. I am NOT making a projector! I just want a flash light.
The design is simple, focus blue light onto phosphor wheel, and then collect all the light into a beam!
The result would be a yellowish tint. Not very pleasing to look at.
For my case, there are two solutions.
- Produce a new phosphor that outputs white light. (similar to the ones used on LEP flashlights)
- Mix blue light into the system to obtain white light.
Solution 1: The industry is currently NOT focused on making white phosphor wheels. There are no buyers. Everyone is only buying Yellow phosphors. If I were to make PWs with white phosphor, it would require new tooling costing of up to 20,000USD+
Solution 2: As I have mentioned before, the yellowish light produced has an even amount of green and red. Once I add blue, it will result in white light! There are phosphor wheels that have unique surfaces on them. Some have a transparent sections. Some have different colors. Some have diffusers to reduce laser speckle. And lastly, some have a reflective diffuser.
If I were to add a section of reflective diffuser, I would directly diffuse the blue laser directly into my output light so it becomes white.
The fixture costs to arrange this would be below 5000USD
Both solutions have a proportionally high cost, so I will stick with the current yellow phosphor and make a decision later.
