Porcine skin damage thresholds for 0.6 to 9.5 cm beam diameters from 1070-nm continuous-wave infrared laser radiation.

There is an increasing use of high-power fiber lasers in manufacturing and telecommunications industries operating in the infrared spectrum between 1000 and 2000 nm, which are advertised to provide as much as 10 kW continuous output power at 1070 nm. Safety standards have traditionally been based on experimental and modeling investigations with scant data available for these wavelengths. A series of studies using 1070-nm infrared lasers to determine the minimum visible lesion damage thresholds in skin using the Yucatan miniature pig (Sus scrofa domestica) for a range of beam diameters (0.6, 1.1, 1.9, 2.4, 4.7, and 9.5 cm) and a range of exposure durations (10 ms to 10 s) is presented. Experimental peak temperatures associated with each damage threshold were measured using thermal imaging. Peak temperatures at damage threshold for the 10-s exposures were ∼10°C lower than those at shorter exposures. The lowest and highest experimental minimum visible lesion damage thresholds were found to have peak radiant exposures of 19 and 432 J/cm2 for the beam diameter-exposure duration pairs of 2.4 cm, 25 ms and 0.6 cm, 10 s, respectively. Thresholds for beam diameters >2.5 cm had a weak to no effect on threshold radiant exposure levels for exposure times ≤0.25 s, but may have a larger effect on thresholds for exposures ≥10 s.