Who Should Attend: Optical engineers who want to improve their knowledge of techniques for designing manufacturable optical systems. The course covers the concepts, disciplines and design methodologies needed to ensure that manufacturability is considered at every stage of the design process.

The course will cover traditional, CNC and moulding manufacturing techniques, and cover shopfloor test and measurement methods. Attendees will learn how to specify tolerances in the most suitable way for their chosen manufacturing and test processes.

Individual attention is paid to the test and measurement of surfaces, components and systems. Particular emphasis is placed on intelligent selection of tolerances, and expressing these effectively in the tolerancing functions of optical design programs.

Attendees should be experienced optical designers. Examples on this course will use the ZEMAX optical system design program, but this is not a software training course: attendees wanting a thorough treatment of the tolerancing process in ZEMAX should consider attending Advanced Optical Design Using ZEMAX instead.

Designing for Manufacturability

• Desensitizing techniques
• Dimensioning components
• Use of doublets
• Coating performance and system design
• Glass selection
• Secondary spectrum correction and glass tolerance
• Tolerancing glass properties
• Special problems with aspherics
• Specifying surface quality
• Test plate fitting
• Assembly technician adjustment & alignment techniques
• ISO and other standards
• Providing End-User adjustments
• Shipping, warranty period and end of life issues
• Expressing manufacturability in the merit function
• Cross-checking designs
• Environmental considerations
• Mounting of components
• Where and when to provide adjustments
• Alignment techniques

Manufacturing Methods

• Traditional polishing techniques
• CNC manufacturing
• Plastic optics and moulding
• Diamond turning of aspheric surfaces
• Hazardous and toxic materials
• Centering of optical components
• Thin-Film coating techniques
• Cementing of doublets
• Limits of accuracy

Surface Test and Measurement

• Measuring radius of curvature
• Measuring irregularity
• Aspheric surfaces
• Assessing surface quality
• Problems with large diameter convex surfaces
• Cosmetic quality
• Transmittance & reflectance
• Limits of accuracy
• Accuracy versus resolution

Component Test and Measurement

• Measuring thickness
• Measuring surface offsets and centration errors
• Edging & decentration
• Measuring roundness of edge diameters
• Mounting optical components
• Errors in doublets
• Mounting optical systems
• Limits of accuracy

System Test and Measurement

• Image quality characterization
• Wavefront measurement
• MTF measurement
• Line-spread function measurement
• Pitfalls
• Limits of accuracy

 

Course Instructors

Eddie Judd is Technical Director of Davin Optronics

Neil Barrett is General Manager of Optima Research.