Defining and Tolerancing Freeform Surfaces for Manufacturing

The adoption of freeform optics by designers and manufacturers has increased in recent years. With the increase in flexibility, a freeform surface can incorporate a system and bring more sensitivities. To effectively control these sensitivities during integration, the tolerancing needs to incorporate the limits of the metrology device for the tolerance operand under test. Understanding a vendor’s manufacturing and metrology capabilities is critical to designing and tolerancing a freeform surface that uses its physical features to aid in integration.

Interfacing with a vendor early in the design process may improve manufacturing timelines due to the alignment of the freeform definition with the available metrology. Gregory reviews favorable freeform definitions along with tolerancing and specification recommendations.

About the presenter
Michael Gregory is an engineer in Optimax’s Laser Grade Optics department. He has been at the company, which he joined after completing an internship at Optimax, for nine years. During this time, he has had several roles. Gregory specializes in freeform manufacturing, metrology support, and optical design.

He earned his bachelor’s degree in applied mathematics in the 2013 from Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT).