Integrating Sphere Painting

Author: Alex Doknjas

Last week, we finished coating our remaining integrating spheres with Avian-B. With these spheres painted, we are able to continue on with the assembly of our flight and prototype payload units. Avian-B is a special kind of coating which reflects over 98% of the light produced by our payload’s lasers. The reflections are diffuse, which means unlike a mirror, the light is reflected uniformly in all directions. This is a very important property for our integrating sphere in order to produce a uniform light source on its output!

We first took care in mixing the coating and being sure to have the right viscosity as specified by the manufacturer.

We then loaded up our spray gun with the Avian-B and tuned the spray pattern to be perfect for painting our spheres. Next we had to apply 20 coats to each half of each sphere of which we painted 6 halves total! Between each coat, the paint was given 5 minutes to dry in a heated environment.

Finally the spheres were done! After letting them dry for 24 hours we took some inspection photos and decided we were happy with the results!

See the YouTube video slideshow for more pictures.