Centrifugal fabrication of low-cost aspheres for point-of-care optical systems
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2019 SPIE. Many point-of-care optical instruments use mass-produced, molded aspheric lenses to reduce the costs and complexity of portable microscopy and spectroscopy systems. This work explores a method for producing low-cost polymeric aspheres and assesses the lens quality for various material types. Single lens imaging of the US Air Force target was used to analyze the experimental resolution limit of each test case. An atomic force microscope was employed to determine the root-meansquare (RMS) surface roughness per lens. Initial results suggest that the system can generate lenses with equitable optical metrics, independent of material type. Preliminary resolution limits of the aspheres have achieved as low as 4 microns, for lenses spun at 250 rpms. Certain materials were found to be incompatible with the fabrication of plano-convex lenses due to the inability to de-mold after curing. Further improvements of the technique, specifically reduced resolution limits, would increase potential utility for low-cost applications in point-of-care optical systems.
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Optics and Biophotonics in Low-Resource Settings V