Novel and flexible method of generating aspheric glass moulds

The work described in this paper is about the efforts towards simplifying the lens making process. The different processes are studied by the author and a new process is developed for making glass moulds to produce aspheric lenses. The new process uses general purpose machine like vertical machining centre. Present process of generating these lenses utilizes special purpose machines, which are capable of producing the lenses of single geometry at a time. The setup time to make a lens of different geometry with these machines is the main bottleneck for the flexible production system. The potentials of the vertical machining centre have been exploded for its use to manufacture aspheric glass moulds. The process is giving better results with use of newly developed technique to generate aspheric surfaces. The resulting surface were showing the sign of partial ductile mode machining giving form error in the profile less than 2%.