Precision Glass Molded Optics: Design Through Manufacturing

Level: Intermediate Length: 7 hours Format: In-Person Lecture Intended Audience: Engineers, designers, managers, and technicians who want to gain a detailed understanding of the precision glass molding process for optical components. No particular background is needed, some prior knowledge of general optical fabrication processes would be helpful. Description: Precision glass molded optics are becoming increasingly popular. The technology has matured rapidly in the last decade and can now be found as a preferred manufacturing process in many applications ranging from diode collimation to fiber coupling, illumination, and imaging both in the visible and the infrared. Precision glass molding lends itself to high volume replication of glass optics, ranging from simple spherical to aspheric, freeform, array and wafer level optics. This course provides a detailed and comprehensive overview of precision glass molded optics. Course topics include glass properties, moldable glasses, preforms, molds and tooling, tooling materials, mold coating, processing, specialty manufacturing processes, applications, molding machines, post-processing, and costing. The course also covers the design process, including tooling design, preform selection and sizing and a detailed overview of design for manufacturing for precision glass molding. This course is for those interested in a more thorough understanding of precision glass molding. Introductory material can be found in course SC1178: Fundamentals of Molded Optics Learning Outcomes: This course will enable you to: - describe the complete precision glass molding process from design thru manufacturing - identify when it is appropriate to manufacture an optical component by precision glass molding - identify the advantages and limitations of precision glass molding - review available glasses and select the most appropriate glass for a specific application - identify sizes and shapes that can be effectively molded - compare the advantages and disadvantages of glass and plastics and learn when to select one material over the other - paraphrase the impact the molding process has on the material properties of the glass - describe the complete process chain for precision glass molding - select the type of preform and design it for a particular optical component - select mold materials and design molds and tooling for precision glass molding - implement design for manufacturing techniques for precision glass molded optics - discuss the different materials and manufacturing methods for molds - identify the different types of coatings applied to molds to extend their lifetimes - recognize what impacts cycle time and how it can be optimized - minimize the production cost and maximize the performance of products using precision glass molded optics - explain the different types of molding processes including specialty molding processes including two-stage, insert, freeform and wafer level molding - identify different types of molding machines and communicate their relative advantages and disadvantages - design preforms, molds and tooling for precision glass molding - implement design for manufacturing techniques for precision glass molded optics - summarize the applications of precision glass molded optics - discuss the typical post-processing techniques used on precision glass molded optics Instructor(s): Alan Symmons has almost 25 years’ experience in molded optics, with over 15 years in precision glass molding. He is a globally recognized expert in molded optics, has published over 2 dozen papers in the field and is the co-author of the ‘Field Guide to Molded Optics’ and ‘Molded Optics: Design thru Manufacture’. He has a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from RPI and an MBA from the University of Arizona. Alan is a fellow of SPIE. Event: SPIE Optics + Photonics 2022 Course Held: 23 August 2022