ASPHERO5 - rapid fabrication of precise aspheres

ASPHERO5 is a funded research project (project prime: Schneider OpticalMachines) with the goal of economic fabrication of high precision aspheres. The research is concentrated on the classical process chain consisting of grinding and polishing. The mid spatial artefacts are one of the limiting factors for grinding, whereas for polishing the variation of the local removal rate depends on the local curvature. In this paper first results of minimizing mid spatial artefacts for the grinding step and analyzing local removal rates for the polishing step are reported. Based on the results of our research, aspheres with local radii from 200 mm to 10 mm are polished to 25 nm rms final surface error. Nevertheless, to perform the different process steps in an economic way is still a challenge.