Laser beam combining technologies are enabling High power Laser directed energy weapons on Trucks, Warships and Airplanes

Among the uses of Laser directed energy weapons (DEW) systems are providing very short-range air defense capability, close-in protection for naval vessels, counter-unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), and protecting friendly forces from mortar and artillery attack. Laser require a power of the order of 100 kW,  to be employed as directed energy weapons,  in  varieties of missions such as wide-area, ground-based defense against rockets, artillery and mortars; precision strike missions for airborne platforms; and shipboard defense against cruise missiles.

Fiber lasers have emerged most promising technology, for directed energy weapons due to their many advantages like: high electrical to-optical efficiency (40%), high reliability for operation in harsh military environments, and high beam quality near diffraction-limited light output. However, the power of state-of-the-art single-mode fiber lasers is limited by thermal and nonlinear effects like thermal lensing to ∼10kW.

Combining multiple low-power lasers with good beam quality into one high-power beam helps in overcoming power limitations of fiber lasers. There are numerous ways of combining laser beams and some are better suited to a given application than others; e.g. in the trivial case of a couple of beams a simple beam-splitter arrangement may suffice but there are limitations in this approach and it rapidly becomes impractical as the number of constituent beams increases.

By using beam superimposing technology, Rheinmetall has combined the power of single lasers into one multiplied laser beam. This technology not only allows superimposition of multiple lasers on a single gun platform, but also superimposition of multiple gun platforms. This enables an almost unlimited (e.g. 100kW and more) power output in line with the evolving air defence requirement. As a result the high-energy laser gun provides efficient protection against a large spectrum of modern air threats.