Designing Manufacturable Optical Systems

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

Timetable

Registration Form

Course Instructors

Eddie Judd is Technical Director of Davin Optronics

Neil Barrett is Director of Optima Research.