Ruby And Sapphire Ball Lenses – The Toughest And The Strongest

By Author: Paul Wright
Total Articles: 266
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Ruby and Sapphire ball lenses are lenses that are made from Aluminum oxide. Ruby owes its red color due to presence of traces of chromium oxide. Though the physical and chemical properties of Ruby and Sapphire ball lenses are pretty the same, their optical properties are bit different. Sapphire ball lenses have excellent optical transmission qualities than Ruby balls. However, Ruby Balls are much easier to handle for physical applications. Ball Lenses are commonly used to improve signal quality in fiber coupling applications. Ruby and Sapphire Balls have characteristic tolerance feature of sphericity being 0.625 micron whereas the diameter being ±2.5 micron.

The reason why Sapphire and Ruby Balls have become very popular is because of their extreme properties as mentioned below,

• High Strength and Hardness.
• High Chemical Stability.
• Excellent for Severe Environments.
• High wear resistance.
• Ability to withstand high temperature.

General applications include,

• Fiber communication
• Endoscopy.
• Laser measurement systems.
• Fiber Optic ...
... Connectors.
• Bar code Readers.
• Flow Meters

Another glass ball called Spinel, has similar properties as that of Ruby and Sapphire. Also Spinel glass ball is more affordable and acts as a best alternative to Ruby and Sapphire. Every single Spinel crystal has a cubic crystalline structure.

High Index Glass Ball Lenses are used, when applications require high power prescriptions and rimless mountings. Polished ball lenses are produced by a mechanical surface and geometry of each ball lens has an optical quality. The higher the index, the more efficiently the light is refracted. The positive of this property is that, less lens materials is required to provide the same amount of correction as standard plastic or glass lenses. The index of refraction is much higher for this ball, providing a shorter back focal length, which simplifies the fiber coupling process.

High index glass ball lenses include excellent properties as mentioned below,

• Scratch resistance.
• Gets thinner as the index increases.
• Index of Refraction of 2.0
• High Tolerance
• Increase in weight with increase in index.

Low Tg Ball Lenses are made from Low Tg glasses. It incorporates some excellent properties as mentioned below.

• Very high resistance.
• Very efficient and environment friendly.
• Incorporates glass transformation temperature that is suitable for precision lens molding. During a precision lens molding process, a polished or fire polished perform is shaped into a final geometry, while conserving its surface quality.
• Special glass composition to reduce the reaction with mold materials within the molding temperature range (between 500 °C and 700 °C).

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