A methodology is developed to perform laser hazard analyses to support field tests of high-energy lasers. This methodology considers realistic worst-case event analyses of specular reflections from planar and cylindrical targets. Our approach uses three models of event data for hazard estimation:
Beam propagation to determine the size of the laser beam on the target;
Reflected irradiance, which depends on the target shape and bi-directional reflectance distribution function;
Exposure time, which is used to calculate the maximum permissible exposure and depends on the locations and velocities of the laser, target, and observer.
Reflected Nominal Ocular Hazard Distances (R-NOHD) were calculated and presented for several targets for the HEL.
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