[macusual]

Hello all,
I work for a small nanotech company dealing mostly with optics and I would greatly appreciate any help.

For my specific applications it would be very useful to obtain an optically clear water-based hard coating. For some reason this is proving really difficult to find... All water based coatings tend to be opaque and there aren't any water-based optical adhesives. Is there any specific reason for this, or am I just not looking hard enough?

[Arkcon]

Did you check Edmund Scientific?  That are sort of the chief go to place for small manufacturers of optics.  I understand you need optically clear adhesive, but why does it have to be water-based?  Is there something specific needed because this is a nano- application?  It seems to me, the best adhesives for ( and I really don't know the technical term here) tight spaces, are UV-curing adhesives.  They flow very well from the bottle, then gel rapidly when exposed to short-UV.  Also, some of the best seals I was able to make were with solvent-cement.  Say, between two pieces of PPMA, a solution of monomer in dichloromethane will flow in by appilary action, and soften the plastic and re-bond stronger than the original pieces.

[macusual]

Yes I checked Edmund Scientific, their adhesives come from Norland Optical Adhesives. I emailed them and they said they did not have anything that meets my criteria.

The reason why it needs to be water-based is because the system we want to disperse is stabilized by surfactants. It might be useful to add that this is not for sealing two surfaces, the purpose is to coat a glass substrate with a hard, optically-active surface.

You're right though, UV-curable coating have been very useful, especially in the optics field - we have a few from Norland actually. But still they never seem to be able to homogenize with water. I don't know why this is. Maybe I need to rethink this entire system...