Micro structured glass optics - basics and benefits

Today’s trends in illumination engineering clearly turn towards high power LED applications with a precisely controlled light output. The first requires glass optics which will withstand the increasing temperature load and lumen output of LEDs. The second requires tight control of production tolerances and defined surface structuring. Especially the surface structure – which can be realized for example as micro lens arrays – is of increasing importance. Using two different fabrication techniques we investigated the implementation of micro surface textures on glass optics. The first method uses directly molded glass from the liquid phase while the second is an imprint process. For both methods we determined the minimum replicable feature size and found current limits of only 50 μm for the imprint process.