Active tables12/18/2023 ![]() “The first questions we ask are, ‘What type of lab do you have? Is it noisy or quiet? Is your lab isolated by quiet interior walls, or does it include exterior walls adjacent to a city street or highway? Does foot traffic during the day make the lab unusable?” Some manufacturers conduct a site survey to evaluate the noise in the room. James Fisher, group director of the Vibration Control Business Unit at Newport (Irvine, CA) agrees. The sources of noise in the lab must also be considered. “It is important to know and understand the sensitivity of a customer’s work to properly recommend the appropriate platform,” says Johns. Some projects are less demanding with respect to alignment, long-term stability, and vibration isolation/damping others can be extremely susceptible to all of these issues. The two most critical aspects to consider when purchasing an optical table are your primary application and the lab environment, says Christian Johns, applications engineer at Thorlabs (Newton, NJ). Tables in this category incorporate more tuned mass dampers or active dampers (see Fig. ![]() For more demanding applications like interferometery, nanopositioning, and imaging, or for labs with excessive vibration and acoustic noise, users should consider a higher-performance table that provides the maximum damping and consequently the most quiet table surface for their application. It is typically preferred for experiments like bioimaging, Raman spectroscopy, nanopositioning, and machining. Basic optical tables for general-purpose use are suitable for quiet environments and provide little or no vibration damping mechanisms, but because of their honeycomb composite construction they provide a rigid platform for general optical experiments that are relatively insensitive to vibration such as spectroscopy, velocimetry, and non-phase-dependent applications.Īn intermediate-grade table typically incorporates broadband damping or a moderate level of tuned mass dampers to reduce the compliance of the table to disturbances. The term optical-table system typically refers to a vibration-isolation system-the tabletop plus the support system (legs)–and such tables generally come in several grades, determined by the level of vibration damping they provide. Following is some guidance from the experts to get you started. A table system is a big-ticket item that can quickly spiral into a budget-busting headache if you don’t carefully weigh the options and specifications across a vast variety of available solutions. A fundamental component of any optical experiment is a table system upon which to build it.
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