Designing the best optical shuttersoptical shutters


Optical assemblies and systems depend on electromechanical shutters. The end-user may also require an optical shutter of a plan if they add requirements after the design.

In these cases, a product's development cycle gets impacted, especially if lifetime qualification, new material interactions, and the development of special test equipment for ongoing production qualification. For example, it can take more than 25 days to complete a lifetime qualification test of a 65 mm shutter at a test rate of slightly more than 1 Hz and a specified lifetime of 2.2 million operations, even for continuous testing.

Optical systems have tight shutters. Therefore, an optical shutter device that met the design specifications would not have been practical off-the-shelf but instead would have required a more customized design, testing, and implementation. Hence, the camera shutter design and implementation took considerable time. The designer could have achieved a seamless performance if the specification for a black reference had been provided earlier in the development process.

In another case, a camera system designer developed an application for a low-cost, high-speed digital camera system. As the designer came to the end of the product development process, he realized the application needed an optical shutter for a remote and an automatic black reference.

Knowing when you need a shutter
Optical Shutters are sometimes impossible to anticipate at the onset of a design; therefore, it's helpful to identify some crucial criteria up front that may lead to a shutter's implementation. Electromechanical shutters used for the following applications:
• Calibration with black-reference or nonuniformity correction (NUC)
• Controlling exposure
• They choose the light source: When several fiber-optic or other light sources are present. Next, a quotation is selected using a shutter.
• They protect foreign objects, dirt, dust, etc.
• Continuous light sources and continuous-wave lasers for accurate and repeatable discrete exposures
• Selecting pulses from a laser or controlling a laser
• When an interlock mechanism is triggered, a shutter turns off a laser quickly.
• Using exposure control to regulate x-ray output