WP4. Flexible Manufacturing Lenses


With relation to lens coatings this Work Package aims to achieve the following objectives:

  • Integrated and automated cleaning, hard-coating, degassing, AR-coating and top-coating.
  • Fast and flexible production with a production time of less than 90 min. The hard-coating step will be done by spin coating with UV-curable lacquers, with advantages, easy to be automated, single lens treatment, fast production time (Cleaning, spinning and UV-curing in less than 2 min). Lenses are oven degassed.
  • The AR-step will be done by sputtering of 4 lenses per cycle with the following advantages: Easy to automate, small batch size, flexible coatings possible: Different Mirror colours like gold, silver, gold with different levels of reflection, different type of AR-coatings with different reflection colours or quality levels. This flexibility is possible because all types of coatings can be done with the same target (coating) material and process gases. Only the process parameters need to be changed automatically driven by software.
  • The top-coating step will be done in a separate chamber to avoid any contamination of the vacuum chamber, batch size 4 lenses with the advantage of applying different quality levels batch per batch

For the tinting of lenses we shall research and aim to find workable solutions in the following areas:

  • Examine and analyse (polished) lens surface material and the lens treatment materials (AR and hard-coating) to define requirements for tinting inks to be applied.
  • Research/define suitable ink-chemical substances that can achieve proper adhesion to subsequent lens surfaces. Research potential conflicts with other lens treatment materials (for hard coating and AR)

Advance in the State of the Art in lens treatment technologies is expected in achieving economically feasible treatment of small batches required in the personalization of lenses. The progress is possible because of the combination of new fast and oersonalized technologies:

  • Application of user defined anti-reflectance (AR) or mirror coatings will be possible. Development of fast sputtering equipment able to coat just four lenses in a twenty minutes batch time. Because of the sputtering flexibility, different mirror colors and AR-coatings with different reflection colors or quality levels will be made.
  • Fast and flexible spin-coating unit to be developed that will reduce the time required for the application of hard coating treatment from three hours to less than two min. Each lens will be coated individually with a proper UV-curable lacquer that will achieve the desired optical and mechanical characteristics of the lens.