For more than 40 years, Dynavac has designed and built optical coating equipment used daily by optics manufacturers, national labs, and observatories. We work with you from initial system design through years of production, helping you maintain consistent performance with dependable, long-term support.
Optical Coating Equipment & Systems
Optical Coating Equipment Proven in the Field
Our thin film optical coating equipment runs on some of the most demanding optics programs in the country. We built the 74-inch Hyperion system at the University of Rochester’s Laboratory for Laser Energetics, engineered the coating system behind the Discovery Channel Telescope at Lowell Observatory, and developed a multi-layer silver coating on a 3.5-meter mirror at the Air Force Research Lab’s Starfire Optical Range.
The case studies and datasheets below go deeper on how these systems were designed, installed, and proven in production.
Let’s Spec Your Optical Coating System
Tell us about your parts, your process, and your production goals, and our engineers will help you scope the right platform.
Optical Coating Equipment FAQs
We manufacture and sell the systems; we’re not a coating job shop. What we do offer alongside the equipment is our Application Lab, where you can develop and validate your coating process on our systems before you commit to buying one. That way, the system you order is already proven against your parts and your spec.
It depends on the platform. The Hyperion precision optical line runs in chambers up to 3 meters and covers everything from R&D and small batches to full production. For large front-surface astronomical mirrors, our EOS platform is built for meter-class optics, including the 3.5-meter mirror we coated at Kirtland Air Force Base. If your parts fall outside a standard configuration, we design around them.
Our optical systems support thermal evaporation, sputtering, and ion-assisted deposition, and we build systems using evaporation, magnetron sputtering, and plasma-enhanced (PE-CVD) technologies depending on the coating. For diamond-like carbon work, we offer dedicated DLC coating systems.
Our optical thin film coating systems are configured for anti-reflective coatings, high reflectors, edge filters, polarizers, and beam splitters. On the astronomical side, the systems deposit aluminum, protected aluminum, or protected silver for front-surface mirrors.
Yes. We provide turnkey design, construction, and commissioning worldwide, and we’ve installed and commissioned systems internationally, including our EOS system at the Observatorio Astrofisico de Javalambra in Teruel, Spain.
Our astronomical mirror coating systems deliver uniformity better than +/-5 percent across the surface of the mirror, using proven thin film equipment designs and both sputtering and evaporation source tooling.
Our systems are designed and manufactured in Hingham, Massachusetts, and Dynavac is ITAR-registered.
