{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.01249024199843872, 'fraction_numerical': 0.00234192037470726, 'mean_word_length': 4.62280701754386, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Laser welding of polymer micro-fluidic devices using novel diode laser sources

The most widely used basic building block for high power diode lasers systems is a 19 emitter diode laser bar. For materials processing tasks, these may be used as single bars, can be built into vertical stacks or may be fiber coupled. For certain applications a line of light is preferred to a round beam and hence the use of fiber optic delivery may not be necessary. Straightforward optics can be used to convert the divergent output from this diode bar into a rectangle of line of focused light but the uniformity of the beam within this rectangle is a major problem. When diode bars are stacked vertically, this problem becomes 2 dimensional for anything other than a tightly focused beam. In particular, when a single bar line source is used to cover a large surface area by motion normal to the long axis of the beam, this non-uniformity creates fluctuations in intensity due to the separation between the individual emitters on the bar. This in turn causes processing problems when a laser line is used to seal multiple micro-fluidic devices. This work reports the use of a novel technique combined with conventional fiber delivered sources and novel laser line sources to tackle this problem.