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Technical Paper

Trial and Tribulations of Optical Manufacturing: Asphere Edition

Gregory Frisch, Kate Medicus, Mark Schickler, Brandon Light, Jessica DeGroote Nelson

What's it about?

With the ongoing advancements in aspheric manufacturing and metrology, companies have to overcome processing challenges and from time to time learn costly lessons along the way. Optimax Systems, Inc., a leader in quick delivery prototype optics, has been manufacturing aspheric lenses for over 20 years. Along the way, we have learned many lessons, some the hard way. In this paper, I will share a few stories of how aspheres have humbled us, how we overcame the problem, and provide takeaways for other manufactures and designers.

Aspheric components can have a great advantage over spherical ones. Some of these benefits include:

  • Increase imaging quality (resolution, distortion), which cannot be achieved by a pure spherical design. [2]
  • Reduction in construction size, save weight [2]
  • Improve the total light transmission [2]

The benefits listed above has led the industry to seek aspheric lenses, yet in most cases optical systems are still designed using spherical optics due to the ease to manufacturing [1] and lower cost...

 

 

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