The present invention relates generally to the compression molding of glass lenses and, more particularly, to methods and apparatus for molding environmentally friendly glass (eco-glass) lenses using metal ion implanted mold tools.
Various methods and apparatus for the compression molding of glass optical elements are known in the prior art. With these methods and apparatus, optical element preforms (sometimes referred to as gobs) are compression molded at high temperatures to form glass lens elements. The basic process and apparatus for molding glass elements is taught in a series of patents assigned to Eastman Kodak Company. Such patents are U.S. Pat. No. 3,833,347 to Engle et al, U.S. Pat. No. 4,139,677 to Blair et al, and U.S. Pat. No. 4,168,961 to Blair. These patents disclose a variety of suitable materials for construction of mold tooling used to form the optical surfaces in the molded optical glass elements. Those suitable materials for the construction of the mold tools included glasslike or vitreous carbon, silicon carbide, silicon nitride, tungsten carbide, a mixture of silicon carbide and carbon, and glasses such as YAS-6. In the practice of the process described in such patents, a glass preform is inserted into a mold cavity with the mold tools residing in an open position. The mold tools reside within a chamber that is maintained in a non-oxidizing atmosphere during the molding process. The preform and the mold tools are then heat softened to bring the viscosity of the preform into the range from about 1010 P to about 106 P. The mold tools are then moved to a closed position thereby pressing the preform to conform to the shape of the mold cavity. The mold and preform are then allowed to cool below the glass transition temperature of the glass. The pressure on the mold tools is then relieved and the temperature is lowered further so that the finished molded lens can be removed from the mold tools.
With regard to the compression molding of near-net-shape glass optical elements, it is well known that a glass preform with a precision polished surface must be pressed between the upper and lower mold halves (or tools) of a mold. If, for example, a double positive lens (convex-convex lens) is to be molded, a spherical or oblate spheroid glass preform of the proper volume is placed between the mold halves. The preform is heated until the glass has a viscosity in the range of 106-1010 Poise, and is compressed until the mold is closed. Then, preferably, mold halves and the preform are cooled to a temperature below the annealing point and the preform is removed from the mold cavity. Such an arrangement is depicted in
Depending on the final shape of the lens to be formed, specially shaped preforms are sometimes required to ensure that the glass flows from the center of the mold cavity to the peripheral edge of the mold cavity.
Although a wide variety of glasses have been used in precision glass molding, there remains a fundamental problem with the molding of oxide glasses. Some of the oxide glasses used for optical elements contain significant amounts of toxic heavy metals, such as lead. These glasses are fairly well behaved in the process and have long-been preferred for their high index of refraction and moldability among other factors. However, national and international regulations are being developed to limit or ban the use of products containing toxic substances such as lead, even in the form of lead oxide. For example, the Directive of the European Parliament and of the Council on Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE, Brussels Jun. 13, 2002), does not allow the use of certain hazardous materials (including lead) in electronic devices that may be land filled at the end of their useful life. Based on this, there is an increasing interest in being able to handle environmentally safe glasses (herein often referred to as “eco-glasses”). There are glasses that use other metal compounds in place of the lead oxide, such as titanium oxide or titania, that are optically equivalent to the currently preferred glasses. However, when molding eco-glasses, such as titania based glasses, there is a chemical reaction between the titania glass and the mold surface which creates surface and subsurface defects rendering the molded lenses unacceptable for the intended applications.
Ion implantation technology is well known and has been used extensively in the microelectronics industry. Ion implantation was applied in the fabrication of microelectronics sometime in the mid-1960s when semiconductor companies realized that P-N junctions and buried layers were possible using ion implantation. Numerous surveys reported that ion beams were used in significant numbers in the industrial sector by the 1970s. Early applications of ion beams were directed to the removal of material (now called etching) and deposition using non-reactive beams.
In the early 1970s, it was found that ion implantation of metal surfaces could improve their wear, friction and corrosion properties. Ion implantation of specific tools is now preferred over other types of coating technologies because the ion implanted layer does not delaminate, does not require high processing temperatures to produce, and does not add more material on the surface (which would change the size of critical components). From the 1980s till today, their use has eventually progressed to reactive processes and property modification. Ion implantation is now used regularly to implant specific tools and equipment (e.g. score dies for aluminum can pop-tops and artificial knee and hip joints).
In recent years, numerous modifications of traditional ion implantation were developed such as knock-in implantation; which is a method for production of ultra-shallow profiles in semiconductors. In some cases implantation is performed through an oxide to thereby knock oxygen atoms into a substrate, typically silicon crystals. The oxygen atoms that recoil build a layer in the crystalline silicon that is occupied by oxygen within a few lattice distances. Knock-in effect is introduced usually in the 100 Å range.
Ion implantation technology has not been used for the purpose of modifying the surface of mold tool surfaces to be used in the molding glass optical elements such as lenses. Further, the prior art fails to teach the use of a temporary solid thin film layer, like hard amorphous carbon, to partially attenuate the kinetic energy of the ion implanting species prior to impact and thereby control the depth of implantation.
It is therefore an object of the present invention to provide a method for molding optical elements from eco-glass preforms.
It is a feature of the present invention to provide a method for molding optical elements that obviates bubble formation at the mold surface/preform interface.
Yet another feature of the present invention is to provide a method for molding optical elements from eco-glasses such as titania at high temperatures without generating adverse surface chemistry effects in the molded element. Still another feature of the present invention is to provide a method for fabricating molding tools which can be used to mold optical elements from eco-glasses such as titania at high temperatures without generating adverse surface chemistry effects in the molded element.
Briefly stated, the foregoing and numerous other features, objects and advantages of the present invention will become readily apparent upon a review of the detailed description, claims and drawings set forth herein. These features, objects and advantages are accomplished by implanting the molding surfaces of the mold tools with high-energy metal ion species.
In one embodiment, the invention resides in a method of molding oxide glass preforms to form optical elements comprising the steps of (a) assembling at least two molding tools into a molding apparatus to form at least one mold cavity therebetween, each molding tools having a predetermined molding surface with metal ions implanted therein, the implanted metal ions reacting with oxygen to form a solid phase material; (b) inserting an oxide glass preform in the at least one mold cavity; (c) heating the at least two of the molding tools and the oxide glass preform to at least the glass transition temperature of the oxide glass preform; and (d) compression molding the oxide glass preform into an optical element with the at least two of the molding tools.
Looking at
It is theorized that during the molding process, there are changes in the structure that release oxygen from the glass in the form of oxygen gas or oxygen ions which then react with other materials in the proximity of the glass preform-mold tool interface and create gaseous compounds (such as CO & CO2) with enough pressure to form bubbles on the surface of the glass preform when Carbon is present at the interface. Phase equilibria studies suggest that SiO2—TiO2 glasses with titania greater than 7-mol % may be metastable. Titanium oxide rich zones precipitate in the form of phase-separated regions where the titanium is tetrahedrally and octahedrally coordinated with oxygen. This behavior is not surprising in the light of the phase diagram shown in
Turning next to
An exemplary mold tool 104 having a concave mold surface 106 is shown in
Lenses molded from eco-glasses using the method of the present invention are free from surface figure distortion that can be caused by the formation of bubbles at the interface between the mold surfaces and the glass preform during the molding operation. Experiments were conducted where STIH53 titania glasses (Ohara Corporation) were molded with titanium ion implanted mold tools 86, 90. After suitable heating time, the mold fixtures 82, 84 were brought together compressing each glass preform 102 into a final molded shape. The viscosity of the preform 102 was less than 1010P during the compression step. As the glass perform 102 was compressed between the mold tools 86, 90, the glass flowed generally radially outwardly and across the surface of the mold tools 86, 90 thereby substantially filling the lens cavity expelling nitrogen therefrom. In conducting this experiment, a force of 75 lbf. was applied to successfully mold optical elements (lenses). The viscosity, molding force, compression rate, lens mold geometry, location of the lens cavities relative to the initial location of the perform, and the sag of the lens mold will affect the propensity for void formation by stagnation, that is, the trapping of gas in the mold cavity. Typically, with mold glass lenses a release coating is applied to the mold surfaces, the preform, or both. The release coating is traditionally some variant of a hard carbon coating. However, there is an inherent propensity for carbon to react with any oxygen present and generate bubbles at the glass-mold interface, which could be trapped regardless of the inhibition created by the titanium ions implanted in the substrate. Therefore, alternate release coatings should be considered when necessary. It is preferred to place the release agent or coating on the mold surface rather than on the preform because the preform surface is remapped during the pressing operation. When the molding process is performed correctly, the curvature of the preform will always be greater than the curvature of the mold surface. In this way, the finished lens will always have a greater surface area than the surface area of the preform from which it was made. It is also possible to coat both the preform and the tool with a release coating other than carbon.
The heater described is an induction-type heater. Heating could also be performed using other types of heaters such as, for example, radiant heaters, resistance heaters, infrared heaters, halogen heaters, etc.
It is important to understand that the material choices for mold tools 86, 90, ion implantation species, and release coating (if any) are made in relation to the particular eco-glass from which preform 102 is made. The ion species is chosen according to the kinetics and thermodynamics of the mold-glass interface interactions. One key to successful molding is choosing an ion implantation process that prevents the formation of a gaseous substance trapped between the mold-glass interface in the molding operation. For example, an alternate embodiment to the present invention could use a tungsten carbide mold tool implanted with zirconium, hafnium (e.g. Group 4 elements from the Chemical Periodic Table) or other reducing element. Reducing substances or elements are those substances or elements that, under certain environmental conditions, will react with oxygen thereby causing adjacent substances of interest to reduce their oxidation state, in some cases to their neutral or ground state. In thermodynamics, the formation of a compound by means of a solid-gas reaction can be described by equation 1 and can be plotted as shown in
where ΔGo is the Gibb's Free Energy of Formation for any substance, R is the gas constant, T is temperature in degrees Kelvin and pO2 is the partial pressure of oxygen at equilibrium. By plotting several curves, one can choose an element such as Ti or Zr, which have much larger negative free energies than Si or C, which will allow for the formation of the solid oxides of Ti and Zr rather than CO2. However, there are limitations on the use of Equation 1 and it can only be used as a starting point for the selection of a candidate ion implantation species because equation 1 and the Ellingham diagram are only true when the reactions have reached equilibrium and the elements are pure. Once you introduce alloys and solutions, such as those existing in the glass preform 102 and the mold tools 82, 84, the partial pressures of oxygen needed for a given reaction will be lower than the ones obtained by Equation 1. It is also necessary that the ion species form a solid oxide, soluble in the glass of interest to prevent the formation of a gas. Finally, if the materials chosen have met the conditions for solid-solution equilibrium at the interface, they must not create disturbances in the other physical and chemical properties of the glass of interest for preform 102.
Turning to
where N is the number of ions, and xi is the perpendicular distance from the surface to the end of each ion track. Straggling is a measure of the width of the distribution and is given by:
The objective of modeling efforts with regard to ion implantation is to predict the distribution of implanted ions for a given combination of ion species, ion energy and target species. To accomplish this task requires a detailed knowledge of how the ions lose energy during collisions.
Several plano silicon carbide tools were implanted with titanium ions and energy ranging from 85 keV to 175 keV. In the experiments performed, the samples were implanted with a constant titanium dose of 1×1015 ions/cm3 (10 ions/nm2). Initially there were concerns about the migration of the titanium ions from its original depth when subjected to high temperature molding conditions needed. Annealing experiments were performed and the migration of the peak ion concentration Rp with respect to depth was found to be insignificant. Actual measurements of the ion concentration with respect to depth were made on plano mold tools to verify the ion implantation profiles and to assess the effect of using the carbon coating. Secondary Ion Mass Spectrometry, SIMS, was used to obtain the ion implantation profile shown in
From the foregoing it will be seen that this invention is one well adapted to attain all of the ends and objects herein above set forth together with other advantages which are apparent and which are inherent to the process.
It will be understood that certain features and sub combinations are of utility and may be employed with reference to other features and sub combinations. This is contemplated by and is within the scope of the claims.
As many possible embodiments may be made of the invention without departing from the scope thereof, it is to be understood that all matter herein set forth and shown in the accompanying drawings is to be interpreted as illustrative and not in a limiting sense.
This is a divisional of application Ser. No. 10/230,908, filed Aug. 29, 2002.
Number | Date | Country | |
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Parent | 10230908 | Aug 2002 | US |
Child | 11048558 | Feb 2005 | US |