PROFILE ACCUCOAT
Enhancing optical performance
Over the last two decades, AccuCoat has grown to become a global provider of optical coatings that serves numerous industries. Jessica Rowbury reports
F
ounded in 1998, AccuCoat has been developing stock and custom thin film optical coatings for almost 20 years. The Rochester,
New York-based firm’s high level of coating expertise has attracted customers spanning 36 countries in the defence and security, medical, and consumer industries, among many others. This year, a particular focus for Accucoat has been on expanding its European market presence, where co-founder Patrick Iulianello sees opportunities in the coating of plastic optics – particularly as Europe already has significant expertise in coating glass optics. Coating plastics is AccuCoat’s forte,
according to Iulianello. Although the company coats various materials, including normal and sensitive glass types and single point diamond turned (SPDT) metals and crystallines, more than half the substrates it coats are plastic. ‘Our niche, what we brought to the
market, is our heavy experience in the development of optical coatings for plastic and polymer components. We’ve been doing it since we opened our doors, and we’ve developed quite a few specialty processes for handling polymer optics of small to medium sized – between 2mm up to 19 inches,’ explained Iulianello. Iulianello noted that, because plastics
make more lightweight, cost-effective and durable components, recently there has been a shift from glass to plastics in an increasing number of medical, imaging, military, and virtual reality applications. However, this substrate requires specialised cleaning, handling, and deposition processes in order to match the optical performance and durability possible on glass.
16 Electro Optics May 2017 AccuCoat has put significant effort into
process development for plastic optics in order to overcome the various coating challenges – for example, plastic is not able to withstand the typical 250°C coating temperatures used for glass without warping or deformation, and it scratches much more easily than glass, meaning that, without proper cleaning, it’s impossible to get good coatings to pass adhesion and Scratch/Dig quality requirements. The firm’s advances in this area over
the years have included redesigning the deposition processes to work at lower temperatures for plastics, and developing a combination of ultrasonic and hand cleaning methods for plastic optics, in addition to learning the chemistry that works best for each plastic type. These efforts have resulted in the
achievement of a high degree of adhesion and excellent optical performance on a variety of plastic materials and form factors, and the company’s standard and custom coatings have been shown to pass a variety of Mil-Spec and ISO specifications. AccuCoat also has strong expertise
coating a variety of normal and sensitive glass types from Ohara and Schott, in addition to a wide range of SPDT metal and crystallines, such as bare and nickel- plated aluminium, silicon, germanium, calcium fluoride, sapphire and Zerodur among others.
The types of optical coatings AccuCoat
produces include anti-reflective, beamsplitters, dichroic and metal mirrors, filters, ITO, and hydrophobic coatings.
80 years of engineering experience Iulianello founded AccuCoat with Paul Meier-Wang after working together for
Co-founder Patrick Iulianello
seven years at Bausch and Lomb, an optics company based in Rochester, where they worked on the development of low temperature coatings on a variety of plastic substrates. Following the sale of Bausch and Lomb’s
Thin Film Technology division, Iulianello and Meier-Wang chose to develop an optical coatings facility for precision optics and started production with AccuCoat in September 1999. With complementary experience in coating precision and plastic/polymer optics, the duo are uniquely placed to develop coatings for an ever evolving customer group. AccuCoat has since grown to about 16 people; it has six coating chambers and
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