Optical Surfaces has delivered a 235mm clear-aperture beam collimator to an unspecified European avionics/defence supplier.
The beam collimator is intended to enable the company to precisely measure the quality of its imaging systems from the visible to the infrared (IR) using modulation transfer function (MTF) criteria.
This comes as the demand for higher-quality, higher-resolution optical systems for integration into sophisticated imaging systems becomes more prevalent.
Beam collimators are optical assemblies that take divergent or convergent incoming light rays and produce parallel light output.
They can be used to replicate a target at infinity without parallax.
Beam collimators can also be used to calibrate other optical devices, to check if all elements are aligned on the optical axis, to set elements at proper focus or to align two or more devices.
Optical Surfaces produced the required 235mm clear-aperture beam collimator with an output wavefront error better than lambda/5 p-v and an off-axis optical design that produced no central obscuration and delivered highly efficient transmission.
