The sealed neutron tube shell dissection process utilizing the traditional lathe turning method suffers from low efficiency and high cost due to the frequency of replacement of the diamond knife. In this study, a hybrid dissection method is introduced by combining the continuous-wave (CW) laser for efficient tangential groove production with an ultra-short pulse laser for delamination scanning removal. In this method, a high-power CW laser is firstly employed to make a tapered groove on the shell’s surface, and then a femtosecond pulse laser is used to micromachine the groove in order to obtain a cutting kerf. The thermal field was theoretically investigated in a finite element model. The simulation results show that the width of the area of temperature exceeding 100 °C is 1.9 mm and 0.4 mm with rotating speeds of 20 rad/s and 60 rad/s, respectively. In addition, a 2 mm deep slot in the 25 mm diameter tube was successfully produced in 1 min by a kilowatt fiber laser, and a 500-femtosecond pulse laser was employed to cut a plate with a material removal rate of 0.2 mm3/min. By using the hybrid method, the cutting efficiency was improved about 49 times compared to the femtosecond laser cutting. According to the simulation and experimental results, this method provides a high-efficiency and non-thermal cutting technique for reclaimed metallic neutron tube shells with millimeter-level thick walls, which has the advantages of non-contact, minimal thermal diffusion, and no effect of molten slag. It is indicated that the hybrid dissection method not only offers a new solution for thick neutron tube shell cutting but also extends the application of laser cutting techniques.

This paper provides the experiment results of a 400 mm 4 × 2 combined slab amplifier system for high-power laser devices based on a new pumping configuration, which involves 37 nm-diameter pulse xenon lamps, a multilamp arrangement, an operating voltage of 31 kV and a uniform pumping arrangement comprising 12 and 14 xenon lamps in the middle and side flashlamp cassettes, respectively. The experimental results show that the small signal gain coefficient was 5.60% cm −1 . The pump-induced wavefront distortion accumulated by six slabs of Nd:glasses is 1.37λ peak-valley (PV) and the pointing offset value of pump beam is about 0.32 µrad/slab/pass. After discharging, the system was purged with clean gas at 0.4 m s −1 . The cleanliness in the cavity returned to level 100 within 20 s, and the heat recovery time of the system was about 2 h.