The recent extreme arctic blasts in the US have meant the unheated area of my basement where my laser resides has reached new low temperatures. Is there a temperature point at which we need to worry about thermal shocking a glass CO2 tube? I have set my chiller to maintain around 18 degrees C year round, but there have been times over the last couple weeks where my water temp has been right around 12 degrees when I went to start up the laser.
Like most smaller chillers, my CW5000 chiller does not incorporate a heater in it. Hopefully it isn't an issue at these temps, but IF thermal shock at the temperature range discussed above is actually an issue worth worrying about, I was thinking maybe relatively gentle heating of the tube could be accomplished by writing a design/program file that fires the laser at the minimum percentage required to fully light the tube for a certain amount of time. For example, 11% power at 1 mm per second speed for maybe 5 minutes? Or maybe stair-stepping it at 11% for two minutes, then 13%, then 15% for two minutes or whatever?
Insights would be appreciated. Thanks.