The IcareLabs AR room is a state-of-the-art anti-reflective coating facility featuring the latest in anti-reflective coating technologies. As the AR manager here at IcareLabs, I'd like to give you a peak behind the curtain to see how we are able to produce these amazing coatings in record time for our customers.
The new 1.6 coating is the big game changer for all of the new Crizal Coatings e.g. Rock, Easy Pro, and Sapphire HR. Crizal formulations have more layers so they take longer than our other coatings. After the lenses are surfaced, lenses needing Crizal coatings are clipped up to go down the dip line.
After the dip line, Crizal lenses receive their first pre-AR inspection. Then lenses are treated in a fast cure oven. This oven cures the coating received from the end of the dip line before Crizal formulations can be applied. For all other lenses, they receive their first AR inspection before heading to the AR chamber.
Now that the the lenses are ready for the chamber, we load them all onto the dome that holds up to 50 pairs of lenses at a time. The dome holding the lenses is what we use to load them into the AR chamber. One question I get asked all the time about our AR dome is "How we are able to fill and unload the dome without losing track of the specific jobs?" Every job has paperwork with the complete order info and bar codes that are scanned to track the job through it's entire journey in our lab.
So, when the job reaches us in AR, the paperwork's number corresponds with a sector on the dome. We then record that number on the job paperwork and keep them clipped together. Each batch of jobs are held in a specific bin. This allows us to reference where the job is on the dome. Following these procedures ensures that every job is correctly matched back up with its tray after it leaves the chamber.
Once the AR process begins, the chamber is vacuum sealed to under atmospheric pressure, During this process, several chemicals are vaporized by a laser beam one layer at a time to be applied to the lenses. We process one side of the lens at a time. After the first run, the dome is removed and the lenses are then flipped. Now the AR process starts again for the other side. For lenses requiring back-side coating only, they are removed after the first run.
Once all the layers have been applied, the chamber is safely vented and the lenses receive final inspection before being sent back to the main lab. From here, uncut lenses are sent to our customers after an overall final inspection while complete jobs are sent to our finishing department to be edged and mounted to their frames.
We recently began processing Shamir Glacier Plus anti-reflective coating in-house. The biggest challenge with this wonderful new coating for us was the installation of the Shamir spin coater in our AR department. Before this, most lenses needing a spin coat received that during the surfacing process in the main lab. My team was able to rise to the occasion and deftly learn the ins and outs so we can ensure that only the highest quality coatings leave the AR room. We achieved all of this with an installation in under a week, with another week for testing and calibrating the machine. This was all done without any disruption to our other AR jobs processing in the AR room.
At our AR final inspection, before lenses leave the AR room, we test for curve with our SMR machine and we test the endurance of the lens with our N-10 machine. In simple terms, the curve confirms correct light transmission and endurance verifies the coating durability. A batch will not leave our AR room without this inspection. Here at IcareLabs, we process an average of 4,500 lenses every week in our AR room with a goal of less than 1.5% error rate.