hi,

Generally PIV lasers are not so powerful. What you are using is roughly 22MW (depending upon the parameters that you provided) of instantaneous power output!!!! As such one can take preliminary caution for eyes. Use a good filter goggle which can filter out 532nm light. It should be good enough to completely block the 532nm at the rated power. Most of the time one has to take care by not looking directly into the laser light or its reflected light from reflective/refractive surfaces. Since you are using pulsed laser with such a short pulse timing, it wont do much harm directly to any tissue as long as the exposure is no longer than once or twice.

My advice is never to make any direct exposure to any of the living tissue from any type of radiation while working with them. For rest of the work, as long as the materials which are being used in PIV are not sensitive towards the particular radiation wavelength (532nm) or the rated laser power, there should not be any worry for it.

Apart from that, further, if you are trying to focus the laser light or shape the beam in any particular geometry, you have to investigate how the laser beam would diverge/converge after it traverses through the beam shaping optics. This will decide how the laser light (power) will evolve as it leaves the experimental zone!!! This investigation can be performed using a low power laser, but equally you have to take precautions for the same.

Regards

If you mean personal eye protection, then use standard protection glasses for Nd: YAG lasers (reject 1064 and 532 nm).

Hello everyone.

First, Bathula, we just use something black. Don't use plastic, though, because it stinks when gets heated by the laser beam.

Second, I would like to let everybody know that we've started a Flow visualization Stack exchange forum. We are building a community currently. Once we have 60 people we will be allowed to proceed to a private beta version of the forum. Please join us if you are interested in flow vis and have questions to ask. Here's the link: https://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/127312/flow-visualization?referrer=NTJlZjIyYzI3Zjk4N2I1NDZmMTJhZDUxMTViODcwMWUyNTM4OTI1YTU1OTYxN2ZkNDcwY2U2ZWI5NmU2OTY5OGhTtnNa4jEjFBFgB4o_K-u-LTdCqWX8yd8vul6HHcUb0