Compatible with the old Lab sphere integrating spheres

Some of the older sphere models offered in the past is no longer sold due to low demand. Because the integrating sphere production line has been upgraded. Sphere attachments have been operated, and routinely modified fasteners now require metric tooling. The newer version products now require a 1.5 mm allen wrench. But the set screws on the old products accepted a 0.035-inch allen wrench. The new port frame attachments are not compatible with the old Lab sphere integrating spheres, nevertheless, the old integrating sphere port fixtures and attachments will fit the port frames on a new integrating sphere design.

Operating procedures for sphere mounted illuminators are provided in the separate instruction manual entitled Halogen Light Sources. This instruction manual applies to all Lab sphere standard products, especially integrating spheres, that were manufactured before the mid-year 2004. That is to say, the information still applies except where noted if your integrating sphere includes an older product version. If your system includes a customized product that operates differently than our standard products, additional information is provided in the system manual.

Lab sphere general purpose integrating sphere is optical device capable of a wide range of applications. General purpose integrating spheres collect electromagnetic radiation from a source completely external to the optical device, usually for the purpose of optical attenuation or flux measurement. The underlying properties of their design are easy to understand because of the basis of their versatility. Radiation introduced into an integrating sphere undergoes many diffuse reflections and strikes the reflective walls. The resulting integrated radiation level is directly proportional to the initial radiation level and may be measured easily, using a sphere detector. After numerous reflections, the radiation is dispersed very uniformly at the sphere walls.

Our standard product, integrating spheres, are coated or fabricated from one of three diffusely reflective materials: Infringed and Spectral on. Occasionally Infringed-LF or Dialect coatings may be applied to a customized product. The Infringed, Infringed-LF and Dialect reflective surfaces are applied as coatings. Theses spheres are constructed of two separate hemispheres, each interior covered with the corresponding highly reflective coating. Spectral on integrating spheres are surrounded by a sheet metal shroud and constructed of two hemispheres bolted together. Spectral on is a highly thermoplastic, Lambert Ian material that can be machined into a wide variety of shapes. 

These integrating spheres can be coupled with a sensor to create a spectroradiometer

The flexibility of the integrating sphere is also important. This flexibility allows you to create light measurement system or your own uniform source, or modify an existing system around minutes. A kinds of system calibration choices enable systems to be customized for application specific tasks.

Our General Purpose Spheres provide greater configuration flexibility than ever before. Choose your integrating sphere by selecting reflectance material, ports and size. The addition of a various range of fungible accessories including port reducers, more allows, light sources and assemblies for a continuous number of application solutions. 

Our sphere design features quick-change accessory options, easy access mounting options and steadfast port frames meeting a multitude of requirements. Lab sphere’s dedicated Calibration Lab provides calibration options to ensure your system is customer-built to meet specific application requirements. Both durable and highly stable over time, these coatings ensure optimal integration of light over the lifetime of your sphere.

Integrating sphere is setup to measure transmittance and reflectance of materials. The integrating spheres also provide an ideal method to measure output of laser diodes and high power lasers. Our spheres can also be ideal tools for measuring optical radiation. Designed to spatially integrate radiant flux, these integrating spheres can be coupled with a sensor to create a spectroradiometer, photometer, or radiometer. Such a setup would permit the flux density of an illuminated area or the measurement of total geometric flux emanating from a light source. Spheres are offered with Spectraflect®, Infragold® or Spectralon® coating which combines a highly reflective surface with almost perfect Lambert Ian reflectance. 

Our General Purpose Spheres are available with inner diameters of 6", 4", or 2". The 4" and 6" spheres also feature port and port frame reducers for the introduction of all kinds of monitoring devices and detectors. Each feature three ports oriented along three orthogonal axes: one port located at the north pole of the sphere, plus two ports along the equator of the sphere at 90°and 0°. A baffle between the 90°and 0° ports prevents direct exchange of radiation between them. Each sphere includes port plugs of varying sizes and two SMA adapters. 

The integrating sphere is manipulated by means of two rotation stages that enable the ports on the sphere to be rearranged in any orientation relative to the input beam

An integrating sphere system has been designed and constructed for multiple optical properties measurement in the IR spectral range. In particular, for secular samples, the absolute transmittance and repentance can be measured directly with high accuracy and the absorptions can be obtained from these by simple calculation. Although the sphere system is used for infrared spectral measurements, the measurement method, design principles, and features are generally applicable to other wavelengths as well. The sphere is manipulated by means of two rotation stages that enable the ports on the sphere to be rearranged in any orientation relative to the input beam. The expanded uncertainties of the measurements are shown to be less than 0.003 ~absolute! over most of the detector-limited working spectral range of 2 to 18 mm. These properties are measured with a Fourier transform spectrophotometer for several samples of both opaque and transmitting materials.

An important application of integrating spheres is their use as an averaging device for detectors. Because of the useful properties of the sphere, an averaging sphere’s entrance port can be both significantly larger and much more spatially uniform than a bare detector. The beneath of using the integrating sphere for more accurate detection of light are used in the design of the system and development of the method presented in this paper. The trade-off made for these improvements is a degradation of the signal-to-noise ratio. The inherent problems of sphere spatial no uniformity are overcome through judicious use of the symmetries of the sphere design to establish symmetries in the measurement geometry. The measurement of absolute transmittance (t), repentance (r), and absorptions (a) of secular samples is described and demonstrated.

After describing the spastics of the integrating sphere in Section 2, the other components of the sphere system in Section 3, and the absolute measurement method in Section 4, we present the sphere characterization measurement results for error analysis in Section 5. The achievement of measurement uncertainties of 0.002 to 0.004 are demonstrated in Section 6 for several common IR materials. Finally, Section 7 contains the discussion of the results with conclusions about the usefulness of the sphere method for secular materials.