I see little utility in using a laser for a heat source in a vaporizer. Lasers are incredibly focused and in general expensive. As said before it could be a scanning laser but then you're dealing with optics and circuits. Even still it won't be heating any material evenly. I'd imagine it would slowly burn it's way through a material instead, even if the material was "scanned". Could maybe point a laser at maybe a ceramic plate of some kind to get some sense of uniform heating, then again, why not use a ceramic heating element?

It would be cool don't get me wrong. Although, ceramic heating elements, resistance wire, etc, are all so cheap and widely available. They also don't participate in photochemical reactions, though they do participate in heat catalyzed reactions of course...

All that phedor probably is, is a ceramic heating element and a power-supply. Might have a thermister but I doubt it. Take the metal parts off of a soldering iron and I bet it would look shockingly similar .

Take a look at the magic flight vaporizer. It uses copper clad steel pipe hangers and stainless steel mesh with a rechargeable battery. Granted the design took some thought and the dimensions of the materials and joining of the metal is important and well done. What I'm trying to say is, why use lasers, there's cheaper effective ways.

I actually saw a functional DIY vaporizer made with a light-bulb(produce more heat then light in the majority of cases) and some basic glass. Looked really nice had a bubbler and everything.

There are a few problems with this idea.

1. If you want to use the laser to heat a plate which contains the spice...you are using conduction which is not a good way to vaporize. Convection is much better. Also if conduction is used almost any other form of heat source would be more reliable, easier to tune, and less expensive.

2. If you want to directly heat the material with a laser the last color in the world that you would want said material to be is white. White is white because it reflects most of the wavelengths of light from the visible spectrum. This means that only a tiny fraction of the power output would go to heating the material. The rest would be reflected to the environment or some poor shmucks retina.

3. Vaporizers are most easy to use when they are transparent so that the user can gauge if they are getting the right amount of heat. High power lasers can fry an area of your retina in milliseconds even from a slight reflection so mixing that with clear glass encasement is inviting danger.


Possible but ridiculous solutions to said problems:

CO2 Lasers - The highest visible wavelengths of red are between 650nm-700nm. CO2 lasers on the other hand are around 10600nm which is literally between light and physical heat. This allows them to impart their energy on almost any substance as almost none reflect this spectrum. CO2 lasers can easily cut mirrors for instance. Such a laser would just as happily heat a white powder as a black one.

The problem: CO2 lasers are big. You would need to devote an entire table to such a device. They are delicate CO2 filled glass tubes that require very high voltages to power and an external liquid cooling system. The beam is also entirely invisible...so dont forget to turn it off before you walk in front of it.


Moral of the story - Stick with your Bic