Six busy months of 2018 are now already behind us. Auer's presence on a number of exhibitions and conferences starting with the Photonics West in San Francisco, LED Next Stage exhibition in Tokyo, L&B and Optatech in Frankfurt, and the Get Show in Guangzhou gave overwhelming feedback and motivation. Thank you to all who spent a visit to our booths! This is our inspiration for new, innovative products and technologies. Let's work on your tomorrow's products.
Enjoy the summer time, your
Auer Lighting Sales Team
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Whenever there is a low demanding environment, parts made from polymer materials (aka “plastics”) are considered for their low weight and freedom in design. They are used for automotive, general lighting and medical applications enabling energy savings and cost effective production. Often an additional coating is required to bring plastics on a good performance level. This makes a special cleaning of the surface, a precise handling and a superior deposition process necessary. Only then the result allows for excellent optical performance, adhesion and durability – a perfect match for our capabilities. Auer Lighting has been producing innovative coating solutions for professional applications for decades. Based on that in-depth expertise, we offer you our competencies also for the coating on plastics. Most polymer materials cannot resist the typical 200 °C temperatures used for the coating of glass, so our engineers have designed a low temperature deposition process, working at temperatures lower than 80 °C. By means of plasma impulse chemical vapor deposition (PICVD) and MicroDyn sputtering we can redefine plastics with an anti-reflex or dichroitic surface. Our magnetron sputtering also allows for the deposition of metal films on a plastic substrate and can be used for decorative and optical reflectivity. In case of optical requirements, very often those metal films are used to improve the performance of the product. Aluminum is a good partner for highly reflective optical surfaces in the visible spectrum with reflectance up to R = 90%.
Reflectance spectra of aluminum (blue), protected aluminum (red) and enhanced aluminum, “alu+” (green).
However, a sputtered aluminum thin film is very fragile without a protective overcoat made of a dielectric material. SiO2 protected aluminum is our most popular mirror coating in the visible and near-infrared regions. The SiO2 top coat provides an abrasion-resistant surface, high durability and an oxidation barrier while maintaining the performance of the bare aluminum mirror. Furthermore, a special top coat can be designed to enhance the visible reflection (up to 95%, see diagram above) even further. Its name: “alu+”. The so-called enhanced aluminum meets the highest quality requirements for reflective surfaces. The overcoating is a unique, highly durable multilayer dielectric film.
