Publications by authors named "Weslin C Pullen"

Deterministic optics fabrication using sub-aperture tools has been vital for manufacturing precision optical surfaces. The fabrication process requires the tool influence function and the tool path to calculate the dwell time that guides the tool to bring surface quality within tight design tolerances. Widely used spiral and raster paths may leave excess waviness from the tool path, and the unavoidable constant removal layer is added to obtain positive dwell time.

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With the rapid development of precision technologies, the demand of high-precision optical surfaces has drastically increased. These optical surfaces are mainly fabricated with computer controlled optical surfacing (CCOS). In a CCOS process, a target surface removal profile is achieved by scheduling the dwell time for a set of machine tools.

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Computer-Controlled Optical Surfacing (CCOS) has been greatly developed and widely used for precision optical fabrication in the past three decades. It relies on robust dwell time solutions to determine how long the polishing tools must dwell at certain points over the surfaces to achieve the expected forms. However, as dwell time calculations are modeled as ill-posed deconvolution, it is always non-trivial to reach a reliable solution that 1) is non-negative, since CCOS systems are not capable of adding materials, 2) minimizes the residual in the clear aperture 3) minimizes the total dwell time to guarantee the stability and efficiency of CCOS processes, 4) can be flexibly adapted to different tool paths, 5) the parameter tuning of the algorithm is simple, and 6) the computational cost is reasonable.

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Precision optics have been widely required in many advanced technological applications. X-ray mirrors, as an example, serve as the key optical components at synchrotron radiation and free electron laser facilities. They are rectangular silicon or glass substrates where a rectangular Clear Aperture (CA) needs to be polished to sub-nanometer Root Mean Squared (RMS) to keep the imaging capability of the incoming X-ray wavefront at the diffraction limit.

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