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DLP/DMD for 365nm light

Carter Haines
Prodigy 50 points
Other Parts Discussed in Thread: TIDA-00293, DLP9500UV

I am working on a research project at the University of Texas at Dallas where we need to produce a patterned image of 365nm light, and we were wondering if we could use DLP/DMD for this?

We saw there are high-end, UV-specific DLP/DMD chips, but they are beyond our budget and not a complete projection system. We would like to use a high power 365nm source but would only use it intermittently (<10% duty), and do not need extremely long lifetime at this stage. Perhaps we could get away with using normal DMD chips rather than the UV-specific one?

So far we have tried putting our current source (LED Engin #LZ1-10UV00-0000) in some old DLP projectors we have around, but they all have plastic lenses/optics in them that absorb the 365m light.

Are there any DLP/DMD projection systems that use all glass optics that we could use for this purpose, or some other way we could try to get this working on a limited budget?

Thank you!

  • 0
    TI__Mastermind 23070 points
    Hi Carter,
    Thank you for your interest in DLP technology. Your observation about Lens/optics materials in projector is correct and some of the components could be made from plastic. We do not have information about material used in an optical engine/projector by the manufactures.

    You may want to experiments with brighter protectors (500 lumens or higher), typically at higher brightness all glass optics are used.

    Regards,
    Vivek
  • 0 in reply to Vivek Thakur
    Prodigy 50 points
    Hi Vivek. Yes, I have even tried with some high-end commercial projectors (4-6k lumens) that were in our surplus department, but they also had plastic lenses.

    I spoke to someone over the phone at TI today who said he looked up and saw that some of the early systems used glass optics, but the more recent variants were plastic, and mentioned I should ask here as you guys might be able to help find these older glass systems. Is it possible to find either an old system with glass optics, or suggest any products that allow UV projection?
  • 0 in reply to Carter Haines
    TI__Mastermind 23070 points
    Hi Carter,
    You best option is to experiment with optical engines used in DLP based 3D printers. Very likely these engines will have all glass optics because they operate at 405 nm wavelenght.
    regards,
    Vivek
  • 0 in reply to Vivek Thakur
    Prodigy 50 points
    HI Vivek, thanks for the suggestion. Unfortunately at 405nm, the usual plastic optics can work okay, but become unusable at 365nm.

    TI has a whole website dedicated to UV projection with "98% transmission down to 363nm" (www.ti.com/.../overview.html), and several product lines (e.g. DLP9500UV) and even this possible candidate: TIDA-00293, so I assume someone at TI has more information on this topic.

    Is there a better forum, or is it possible to be put in touch with someone on the team who understands/works in this area?

    Thank you!