The monitoring of mechanical strain is essential in developing new materials, designing mechanical components and structural health monitoring. In applications where contactless measurement is required, a novel method is needed to allow for absolute and long-term measurements. We discuss a measuring principle based on diffractive nanostructures featuring these advantages. For the measurement, periodic nanostructures are applied to a component, illuminated with a defined light source and the resulting color impression is monitored. The relationship between the stretched geometry of the nanostructure and diffraction spectra allows to quantify the component’s strain. We present a guideline for the design of industrial applicable and sensitivity-optimized nanostructures and discuss the advantages in different application scenarios.
Miniaturized optics are main components in many different areas ranging from smart devices over medical products to the area of automotive and mobility. Thus several million if not billions of small lenses are merged into objectives. The optical function of these objectives can only be guaranteed, if all optical surfaces not only meet the form tolerances of the optical design but also have the right position with respect to another. To ensure this, a measurement method has been developed, that is able to measure the surface form and the centration of both functional surfaces of single micro optical polymer lenses. The method bases on Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) so that due to the tomographic measurement principle both functional surfaces can be captured in one measurement. Key challenge is the reconstruction of the geometric form of the functional surface facing away from the measurement head since it is distorted due to the refraction of light on the functional surface that faces towards the measurement head. The distortion needs to be corrected by means of backwards ray tracing. The OCT-based characterization of the single optical elements allows an adaptive assembly of micro optical imaging objectives by feeding back the individual shape of every single optical component to the assembly process. This information can be used for either selective assembly or the compensation of individual component tolerances by matching components whose form and centration errors cancel each other out in the overall system.
The BabyLux device is a hybrid diffuse optical neuromonitor that has been developed and built to be employed in neonatal intensive care unit for the noninvasive, cot-side monitoring of microvascular cerebral blood flow and blood oxygenation. It integrates time-resolved near-infrared and diffuse correlation spectroscopies in a user-friendly device as a prototype for a future medical grade device. We present a thorough characterization of the device performance using test measurements in laboratory settings. Tests on solid phantoms report an accuracy of optical property estimation of about 10%, which is expected when using the photon diffusion equation as the model. The measurement of the optical and dynamic properties is stable during several hours of measurements within 3% of the average value. In addition, these measurements are repeatable between different days of measurement, showing a maximal variation of 5% in the optical properties and 8% for the particle diffusion coefficient on a liquid phantom. The variability over test/retest evaluation is <3 % . The integration of the two modalities is robust and without any cross talk between the two. We also perform in vivo measurements on the adult forearm during arterial cuff occlusion to show that the device can measure a wide range of tissue hemodynamic parameters. We suggest that this platform can form the basis of the next-generation neonatal neuromonitors to be developed for extensive, multicenter clinical testing.
Laser material processing has become an indispensable tool in modern production. With the availability of high power pico- and femtosecond laser sources, laser material processing is advancing into applications, which demand for highest accuracies such as laser micro milling or laser drilling. In order to enable narrow tolerance windows, a closedloop monitoring of the geometrical properties of the processed work piece is essential for achieving a robust manufacturing process. Low coherence interferometry (LCI) is a high-precision measuring principle well-known from surface metrology. In recent years, we demonstrated successful integrations of LCI into several different laser material processing methods. Within this paper, we give an overview about the different machine integration strategies, that always aim at a complete and ideally telecentric integration of the measurement device into the existing beam path of the processing laser. Thus, highly accurate depth measurements within machine coordinates and a subsequent process control and quality assurance are possible. First products using this principle have already found its way to the market, which underlines the potential of this technology for the monitoring of laser material processing.
Two-Photon Polymerization (2PP) has become an established process for fabricating individual micro-and
nanostructures nearly in the last two decades. Its high degree of freedom opened up novel possibilities for a large range
of applications like functional structures for cell growth, photonic crystals, nanoantennas, diffractive optical elements
and lab-on-a-chip structures (just to name a few). Since the measurement of structures written with 2PP is always very
time consuming, we present a comparison between white light interferometry (WLI) and confocal microscopy (CM)
which were used for measuring structures written with 2PP. By performing a GageRR analysis with both metrology
devices, we calculated the process tolerance one has to accept when measuring these structures with WLI or CM.
Several optical measurement principles have proven their potential for high-resolution surface measurements.
Among a few others, white-light interferometry has proven its capability for the measurement of technical
surfaces, but yet, white-light interferometer systems cannot be miniaturized enough e.g. for the measurement
inside small boreholes.
In this work, a fiber-optic measurement system is described. Since the measuring principle is based on lowcoherence
interferometry (LCI), the system provides non-contact surface measurements with nanometer accuracy.
We present a system set-up for surface profile acquisition as well as the application of the system for the
determination of roughness and waviness parameters. An outstanding feature of the proposed system is the
miniaturized fiber-optic sensing probe, which is built up in all-fiber design. With a probe diameter down to
800 μm, the system can be used for measurements inside small cavities, e.g. bearings or injection nozzles. Beam
shaping is realized with graded-index (GRIN) fibers. Conclusively, the results of evaluation measurements are
compared with ISO 5436-1 type A and D measurement standards.
Low-coherence interferometry (LCI) is an established metrological technique, that has proven its capability to
measure both fast and highly accurate. To provide these advantages for the measurement inside small spaces
like bore holes or micro-tubes, the design of a miniaturized probe tip is necessary. The use of fiber optics fulfills
the requirements for the realization of flexible and small probes, which are at the same time suitable for lowcoherence
interferometry. In this work the development of miniaturized probes in all-fiber design for the use
in a LCI system is described, which consists of a modified Michelson interferometer with non-moving optical
elements. Beam shaping is achieved by the use of graded-index fibers. Thus sensor tip diameters can be reduced
down to 125μm for bare fiber design. Furthermore, validation measurements for the combination of probe head
and LCI system are presented, that prove the potential and limitations of all-fiber probes for LCI. Conclusively
an outlook for potential fields of application is given.
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