coldshield production at Opti-Forms, Inc.

Coldshield Production Process

Opti-Forms manufacturers coldshield reflectors to your exact material, form factor, and coating specifications to guarantee the thermal performance required in IR Focal Plane Arrays and IR Cameras.

If your application requires a custom IR coldshield that is rugged and lightweight, Opti-Forms can help design and manufacture it to your specifications. Opti-Forms can produce thin walled (0.002) complex form factor coldshields from a variety of materials including Ni and Cu.  We also offer the capability to add a variety of IR reflectance and absorbance coatings required for your specific system performance in our state of the art coating laboratory.

Electroformed coldshields are grown by electroplating on a precision cut "reverse image" master tool. The resulting coldshield replicates the surface of the master.  Production techniques control the wall thicknesses to precise tolerances with ultra-low mass.  This results in better cooling characteristics and infrared micro-imaging spectrometer signal-to-noise performance.

Coldshields typically utilize a temporary or expendable mandrel designed to match the exact inside desired dimension of the finished part.  This is the material onto which the electroformed part will be deposited – usually in Ni or Cu – and it is used as the cathode in the process.

The metal is deposited on the mandrel with exacting process control and tolerances with careful attention to density, stress and crystalline structure which are influenced by the plating solution, pH, temperature and cathode current density.

Once the deposition is complete and the desired thickness achieved the entire piece is subject to a chemical reduction that react only with the expendable mandrel leaving the “hollow” coldshield at the end of the process.

The coldshield will be coated with specified plating materials inside (CuO) and outside (Au) for optimum performance characteristics, rejecting adjacent thermal (IR) noise.

Why a Coldshield?

Infrared detectors (camera arrays etc.) require shielding from stray and unwanted IR radiation to obtain optimal signal-to-noise figures on a desired target.  Many of these coldshields are cryogenically, or electronically, cooled as in military and aerospace applications. They may however not remain in the cooled state all the time and need to be available with minimal delay.  The ultra-low mass and thin wall characteristics of the Opti-Forms coldshield allow minimum cool down time before maximum detector performance is achieved.

Talk to our Sales Group about Coldshields