Rod & Cone Lenses

Knight Optical supply a range of custom rod and cone lenses for a variety of applications.

Custom plain rod lenses:  custom rod lenses are a special variant of cylindrical lenses in that they are complete rods where the light passes through the sides of the rod and focuses a line.  Rod lenses have an outside face that is polished and the ends ground.  Typical uses for rod lenses would be to generate a line image from a circular laser beam.  We can supply custom rod lenses both mounted and unmounted. Our mounted rod lenses can be easily attached to laser heads and then easily rotated into the correct orientation.   Our custom rod lenses can be supplied in borosilicate to meet visible and NIR applications or UV grade fused silica to meet applications down to 175nm.  Custom rod lenses can be manufactured to virtually any manageable length and diameter to meet your specific application.  Rod lenses can also be provided with an antireflective coating for increased throughput performance.  Custom rod lenses can also be provided polished on both ends and used as light pipe homogenising rods.

Custom 45° rod lenses:  are a special variant of cylindrical rod lens that has one end ground and polished flat with the opposite end ground and polished at 45° and are used to bend the light at 90°.  The circumference of the lens is ground as light is passed through the Plano end and reflected at 45°.  Custom 45° rod lenses can be manufactured in a range of materials and in a range of custom diameters and lengths to meet your specific application.  Custom 45° rod lenses can also be coated with antireflective coatings to increase throughput performance or coated with a range of vacuum deposited mirror coatings to form a 45° rod mirror.  Typical applications for custom 45° rod lenses are endoscopes, borescopes and fiberscopes and a range of laser and imaging applications.

Custom cone lenses:  are cylindrical rod lenses with one end worked into a conical surface. The circumference of the rod is typically ground whereas the conical element is polished.  This makes the lens ideal for 360⁰ illumination, laser and imaging systems.  We can custom manufacture these cone lenses to and diameter required and custom angles can be polished to meet your specific application.

Custom laser-line generator lenses/ Powell prisms: Laser line generator lenses otherwise known as Powell prisms, are designed to change an input laser beam into a uniform fan beam laser line. Laser line generator lenses can be customised for different input beam diameters, wavelengths, fan angles, distances, and laser line uniformity.  Powell prisms are typically used in profiling and scanning applications. Anti-reflection (AR) coatings available on request for increased performance.

Laser line generator lenses are typically manufactured from: N-BK7 or equivalent and N-SF6 or equivalent and at 9mm diameter with lengths of 7-9mm.
Laser line uniformity:  <35%, <25%, and lower Typical fan angles:  5°, 10°, 15°, 20°, 30°, 45°, and 60°
Shapes: Circular or square

Knight Optical offers a range of custom rod and cone lenses to suit a variety of applications. Alternatively we can edge stock components for a fast turnaround.  Every component is individually tested by our highly skilled technicians in our state of the art metrology lab to ensure all components meet our high quality standards.

Contact our multilingual technical sales team and discover how Knight Optical’s high quality custom rod and cone lenses along with our service can improve your instrumentation and supply chain experience.