What's it about?

Aluminum oxynitride, commonly referred to as ALON™, is a transparent
polycrystalline ceramic. ALON’s transparency spans from the UV to the IR and it has excellent ballistic characteristics making it desirable for many military (IR domes and conformal windows) applications. ALON is formed into near net shape by conventional powder pressing techniques, but an optical finishing step is required to produce surfaces suitable for optical applications. In our work, we greatly reduced the overall ALON fabrication time by improving the rate and quality of the conventional grinding steps.