Quote Originally Posted by 2fprototypes View Post
Do you have drawings?
Thank you for your response.

Do I have the design ? No not yet.

Since I posted here, I came to learn that an iris diaphragm that is well designed and well fabricated should NOT ever have a minimum aperture of 0 (zero). For example, see this link - https://tinyurl.com/y7n6n8wt, from PL equipment, making this claim, pertaining to motorized optical iris diaphragms.

On the flip side, I have this other link from Eksma Optics - https://eksmaoptics.com/optical-syst...is-diaphragms/, that suggests there are indeed zero aperture iris diaphragms. But as discussed in the previous link as well, I think there are special cases, that "consist of 2 parallel planes of blades which can fully obstruct the light."

Question 1
So which of these 2 claims is correct!? And is zero aperture OK in terms of design, fabrication and use through 10 - 100K cycles?

Not knowing the answer to this question has paused my work. Unless a sharp-edged internal aperture, consisting of iris diaphragm blades, goes down to 0, the soft biological material within it will not get sliced into two clean pieces.

Question 2
The other question a colleague raised is whether each of the blades in an iris diaphragm is at a marginally different height, thereby eliminating even the possibility of a clean cut one would obtain from a guillotine mechanism. This would be especially true if a 0 aperture design would require 2 planes of blades.

If it'll be like chad hanging from a sheet of paper on which a 3-hole punch worked, but did not slice through 100%, then such sample processing would be an outcome defeating the very purpose of this entire exercise.

Design Resource
However, if you think engineering logic does indeed support the validity of zero aperture iris diaphragm, AND processing the sample with a neat cut, then I can buy this cheap subscription to https://iris-calculator.com/. On this website, it does allow the aperture to be zero, though it asks for confirmation.

If you or anyone on this forum can help me make a call on these questions, then I am happy to play around on this website, pay for subscription, generate the 'DXF file' and then attempt to convert that to an STL file, which is one of the file formats used by 3D printers, right?

Look forward to your advice. Thanks!