Effect on the cw hydrogen/deuterium fluoride chemical laser with different diluents

The He is usually used as diluent in combustion cw hydrogen/deuterium fluoride (HF/DF) chemical lasers. Sometimes, the N2 is also used as diluent in cw HF/DF chemical laser, because N2 is more cheaper than the He. It was thought that the efficiency of cw HF/DF laser with N2 diluent was lower than that of HF/DF laser with He diluent since the molecular weight of N2 is heavier than that of He. In this paper, the performance of cw DF chemical lasers with He and N2 diluent was investigated. The small signal gain, power spectral distributions, cavity pressure, power and efficiency of DF lasers with these two diluents have been calculated using a finite-difference technique for the numerical integration of the steady and unsteady Navier-Stokes equation with reactive flow (compressibility scaling method-CSM), which was developed in the chemical gas dynamic laboratory of the state institute of applied chemistry in Russia. The numerical results show that the efficiency of DF lasers with N2 diluent is not lower than that of the lasers with He diluent.