Hughes Danbury begins fabrication of rugate coatings for Air Force

Hughes Danbury begins fabrication of rugate coatings for Air Force

Hughes Danbury Optical Systems (Danbury, CT) has begun the baseline production phase of the Rugate Coating Reproducibility Program for the Wright Laboratory of the US Air Force Materiel Command`s Manufacturing Technology Directorate. The 3.5-year, $3.1 million contract is focused on improving the rugate-manufacturing process to increase consistency, yield, and throughput while reducing costs. Rugate coatings are characterized by an index of refraction that varies continuously and periodically as a function of film thickness; they have applications in optical filtering.