A cylindrical lens is an aspherical lens that can effectively reduce spherical and chromatic aberration.

It is divided into flat convex cylindrical lens, flat concave cylindrical lens, and cylindrical lens.

It has one-dimensional amplification function. Mainly used for changing the design requirements of imaging size. For example, converting a point light spot into a line spot, or changing the height of the image without changing its width. It can be applied to linear detector illumination, barcode scanning, holographic illumination, optical information processing, computer, laser emission, etc. Optical cylindrical lenses are also widely used in high power laser systems and Synchrotron radiation beams. With the increasingly widespread application, the demand for cylindrical lenses is also increasing, especially in high-precision testing instruments and devices such as high-power laser resonators and long-distance offline interferometers.

The production process of cylindrical mirrors mainly includes rough grinding, fine grinding, polishing, and centering edge grinding.

Coarse ground cylindrical lens

Usually, the rough grinding of cylindrical mirrors with small radii involves gluing a square blank onto a mold, forming a cylinder, and then machining the outer circle to obtain the cylindrical surface. For parts with a thickness equal to or greater than the curvature radius R of the cylinder, the rough grinding is generally carried out first to form a complete cylinder, followed by fine grinding and polishing before removing any excess parts.

A conventional cylindrical grinder can be used for rough grinding of cylindrical mirrors, but if the diameter of the cylindrical mirror is small, a centerless grinder should be used.

When producing cylindrical mirrors in small quantities, it is also possible to manually grind off the four corners of the square blank on a rough grinder, install the cylinder on the spindle of the instrument lathe, and then install a flat iron plate tilted at a certain angle to the horizontal plane on the lathe tool holder to process the outer circle. The rough grinding of cylindrical mirrors with a curvature radius of medium or above can be formed by milling.

Finely ground cylindrical mirror

When the quantity of small radius cylindrical mirrors is not large, the method of manually adding an instrument lathe can still be used for precision grinding. The detail is to replace the precision grinding abrasive. When mass production is carried out, the method of upper and lower flat grinding with a separator in the middle is generally used. During the precision grinding process, the cylinder should be regularly turned around to avoid grinding into a cone. Another way to fix the separator is to have an outer retaining ring and replace it with a central spindle.

For cylindrical mirrors with medium radii, after milling and forming, they are often glued to the mold to form a mirror column for precision grinding. Then install the mirror column on the lathe spindle, and then install the mold on the lathe tool holder before adding loose abrasive for fine grinding. For concave cylindrical mirrors and large radius cylindrical mirrors that are not suitable for gluing into cylindrical bodies, they are often first glued into a mirror disc, and then finely ground with corresponding cylindrical molds on a dedicated cylindrical machine tool.

Polishing of cylindrical mirrors

The processing method of polishing is similar to precision grinding. Generally, there is a layer of felt with a thickness of 3-5 mm on the polishing mold, and the length of the polishing mold is about 1/3 of the length of the column.