Markets &
Applications

• Solar
• Optics
• Health
• Aerospace
• Defense

Aerospace

VPT systems really shine in aerospace, where the optics are typically very high value substrates—requiring a great deal of time and effort to shape and make the surface flawlessly smooth. In these applications, the coating system must be of the highest reliability, with literally no room for error. When you simply can not afford a bad coating run, the reliability and repeatability of VPT systems make them the smartest, most dependable choice.

The vacuum system we developed to coat the 96” diameter mirrors on NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is a perfect example. No one had ever achieved such extreme layer thickness uniformity over such a large, heavy substrate. VPT was able to accomplish it by using computer models to determine the specific combination of fixed and rotating uniformity masks it would take to precisely control the layer thickness.

Coating applications include:

• Optics for space telescopes

• Primary and secondary optics

• Stray light reduction coatings

• Focusing optics

• Optics for astronomy instrumentation used in space exploration

• Spectrometer optics

• Multispectral imaging

• Thermal imaging

• EMI shielding

Coating types include:

• Dielectric coatings

• Conductive coatings

• Metallic coatings

Substrate types:

• Glass, fused silica, etc.

• IR materials, Germanium, Sapphire, ZnSe, etc.

• Metals, including diamond-turned surfaces and foils

Product types include:

• Mirror coatings: High Reflectivity (High R), enhanced and protected metal mirrors, hot mirrors, cold mirrors, beam splitters

• Optical Filters: bandpass, shortpass, longpass, narrow bandpass, wideband, notch, neutral density, laser line filters, blocking filters, stray light reducing coatings

• Anti-reflection coatings