Optomechanical bonding or mounting with adhesives has demanding requirements which are more severe than most other bonding applications. Stress must be minimized to prevent optical distortion and must be considered over the entire operating temperature. No failures are desired along the bondline and bonded components must remain precisely located over their entire lifetime. UV Curing adhesives can offer advantages for fastening or mounting of optics if the mechanical design is configured to take advantage of the handling characteristics of the adhesive. Use of these materials simplifies any process that requires critical alignment or exact positioning. This paper describes some of the considerations which must be taken in order to choose the best UV adhesive and how to control them for maximum performance in a system.
Ultraviolet curing adhesives are widely used in optical lamination of precision optical lenses, safety windows, holographic displays, and flat panel displays. In most of these applications they are being used in relatively thin films from 3 microns to 40 mils, because most formulations will only allow uv light to penetrate to a certain depth. If the formulation does cure in thicker sections, the stress due to shrinkage typically becomes a problem. U.V. adhesives have been developed which can be cured in relatively thick sections with minimum stress. In this paper, a number of formulations are compared for variations in stress when cured in thick sections and the conditions and mechanism to minimize stress are characterized.
Outgassing of adhesives and coatings can cause problems in optics used in space applications. The actual test NASA runs on candidate materials is very expensive and time consuming. End users will typically test every batch of material they receive and reject any that do no pass the requirements. This paper discusses a test which acts as an indicator to measure the relative performance and determine if the manufactured material will pass the outgassing requirement without going through the actual ASTM test. This is not a substitute for the final test. Its purpose is for screening materials being used in manufacturing or research.
Fiber undercut and protrusion have been shown to play a key role in back reflection performance of pc polished connectors over temperature. End users are placing tolerances of +/-0.10 microns or less on the height differential between the fiber and the ferrule after polishing to get their performance requirements. Two methods for measuring this submicron height are compared, a stylus profilometer and an interference microscope. The surface profilometer provides an accurate two dimensional profile of the connector end face. The interferometric technique uses a tilt phase to provide information on the relation of the fiber to the ferrule surface that normally would not be seen. Advantages are shown in the three dimensional nature of the interferometric data which is ideal for measuring spherical surfaces and the simplicity and speed in which measurements can be made.
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