MODELING HIGH-PRESSURE CHEMICAL OXYGEN-IODINE LASERS

The Blaze II chemical laser model was baselined to existing oxygen-iodine research assessment and device improvement chemical laser (RADICL) data, Mixing calculations for the RADICL nozzle indicate that higher iodine flow rates are necessary to maintain a significant fraction of the nominal performance as the helium flow rate is increased to raise the total pressure of the flow; this agrees with RADICL experimental data, Overall, the model is in very good qualitative and quantitative agreement with RADICL data as a function of increased He flow rate over a total pressure range of 70-130 Torr. This was accomplished only after the nominal I-2* + He --> I-2 + He rate constant was increased by an order of magnitude, To determine the set of five unknown parameters which best matched Blaze II model predictions with experimental data, a genetic algorithm technique was implemented to efficiently search the parameter space, This is the first known application of the genetic algorithm technique for modeling lasers, chemically reacting flows, and chemical lasers, Different reduced reaction/species sets were investigated; a 13-reaction, 10-species set gave excellent agreement and an 8-reaction, 8-species set gave very good agreement with the full reaction set.