Tech Briefs Magazine - May 2021 - PIT-19
Designing Large Diameter Aspheres
he optics industry is experiencing
trends of both increasing laser power
and the advancement of coating technology to accommodate this demand.
However, an optic does not always need
to utilize leading-edge coating technology to implement high-power lasers into a
system. A second solution is to increase
the size of the beam, and therefore the
size of the optics, which will lower the
overall power or energy density per unit
area on the optic. This requires large
beam expansion optics, as well as focusing optics further along the optical path.
A second catalyst for increasing optic
size would be any light collection system
that is collecting collimated light. The
larger the diameter of an optic, the more
surface area to collect. In both of these
cases, and countless others, there are performance increases that can be realized by
designing in aspheric lenses opposed to
spherical lenses. Previously, designers may
have been hesitant to design in aspheres
with diameters larger than 100 mm, having concerns around manufacturability
and metrology equipment available to verify an asphere so large. However, with
advancements in both manufacturing and
metrology, aspheres as large as 200 mm
are now commercially available.
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Large Versus Very Large
When discussing large aspheres, it is
important to make a distinction between
large aspheres and very large aspheres,
which cannot be hand-carried by a single
person and require mechanical support
to move them around. Those present
even more challenges and require planning out the manufacturing process up
front in great detail.
Although it is definitely fun to align a
1.02 meter optic on a polishing machine
using a sledge hammer, the focus of this
article is on the manufacturing limits of massproduced large aspheres. These lenses
have design considerations and limitations
in addition to the general manufacturability considerations for normal-sized aspheres.
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Fabrication Considerations
Diameter
An obvious manufacturing limit that
comes to mind is the size of the asphere
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Figure 1. Convex aspheres require a larger horizontal range of motion during grinding and polishing.
Photonics & Imaging Technology, May 2021
19
Cov
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Tech Briefs Magazine - May 2021
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