Design and Implementation of a Flash Lamp Pumped Nd-YAG Pulsed Laser for Electro-Optical Sensors Soft Damage

Laser soft damage of electro-optical (EO) sensors can be defined as the destruction of electronic primary devices, or the photo detectors. This damaging effect causes system’s functions to be lost. In this paper dazzling and soft damage of electro-optical sensors, including, complementary metal oxide semiconductors (CMOS) imaging sensors and charge-coupled devices (CCD) imaging sensors were studied both theoretically and experimentally. A MATLAB simulation model was built and used for predicting the design parameters of practical laser system. This laser system is capable of damaging EO sensors from laboratory scale to far field distances; this was achieved by maximizing the laser pulse energy. In addition, we designed and implemented an enhanced high energy flash lamp pumped pulsed Nd:YAG laser system with 2 J energy to achieve soft damaging of numerous types of EO sensors at different distances. Good agreement between the theoretical and experimental results obtained and a CCD image sensor was successfully soft damaged at a distance of 4 Km in free space environments.