Comment by RosanaAnaDana
4 years ago
So how does it do the killing aspect? I guess I would have previously assumed that you need to heat up/ burn the mosquito to kill them. What wavelength of laser is suitable for killing mosquitos?
4 years ago
So how does it do the killing aspect? I guess I would have previously assumed that you need to heat up/ burn the mosquito to kill them. What wavelength of laser is suitable for killing mosquitos?
There's some available literature on the subject of required laser wavelength/energy for an in-flight thermal mosquito kill: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-71824-y.pdf
For a thermal kill you have to deliver some number of Joules of energy into the target. You can use a lower powered laser over a longer period of time, up to a point. You have roughly 25 milliseconds of thermal confinement time before the mosquito starts to cool off. Longer exposures can work, but the total energy dose needed goes up. Longer exposures also require keeping the laser aimed at the target for a longer time.
Power needed also depends on how closely you can track the target. If you make the spot small enough that the target catches all of it then you minimize power requirements, but that increases the complexity of the optics. If you use a spot size larger than the target then the optical and tracking complexity go down, but you're no longer sending all of your Joules into the target.
We chose the laser based on the power since the task is to heat up. Used 1 W, but for burn wing don't need so power.