May 28, 2021
Adhesion Testing for Thin-Film Coatings By Dan Fiore, Vice President of North American Coating Laboratories One of the key mechanical tests coating service providers offer is an adhesion test. There are multiple ways to confirm acceptable levels of coating adhesion to a substrate, but most of them involve some form of adhesive being applied to the coated surface, and being removed at varying levels of speed at predetermined angles from the coating/substrate interface. Adhesion tests remain one of the most widely accepted and utilized ways in which optical fabricators confirm durability and reliability of their thin-film coating. Common Adhesion Test…
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April 29, 2021
By Dan Fiore Vice President, North American Coating Laboratories Indium tin oxide is a transparent conducting oxide composed of indium, tin, and oxygen that can applied to optical and non-optical substrates such as glass, polymers, films, and crystalline surfaces. ITO is the industry standard for transparent conductive films as it is robust, has good sheet resistance range and respectable UV-Visible and Near IR transmission which allows for good flexibility with multiple applications. Other members of the transparent conductive oxide family are IZO (Indium Zinc Oxide), and AZO (Aluminum Zinc Oxide). Applications and Uses for ITO Coating Optical manufacturers and display…
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March 25, 2021
By Dan Fiore, Vice President What is a beamsplitter coating? Beamsplitter coatings can be deposited in a variety of different ways and perform in an array of different substrate scenarios. Beamsplitters can be applied to cubes, prisms, plates, hexagons, and pentagons. They can be polarizing, non -polarizing, or both, they can also come in narrowband or broadband varieties. If that isn’t enough to confuse you, these coatings can be comprised of dielectrics or metals, and can be designed to have an escape index of air, optical cement, or even optically contacted (a bonding process without epoxy). This blog will help…
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February 16, 2021
Infrared vision is the ability for optical systems to detect heat signatures or waves of light emitted via infrared radiation. Thermal vision and thermal imaging are also commonly used terms in this situation since infrared waves emitted from a body are directly related to the body’s temperature: warmer objects emit more energy in the infrared spectrum than bodies with a lower temperature, hence their heat signature is more viewable. The human body, as well as many moving or static objects, are typically warmer than the surrounding environment. Since warmer objects produce more infrared energy than colder ones, it is easier…
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