Technological advances in areas important to industry, defense and society are moving rapidly with requirements to see and sense in ways not thought possible before.To realize such advances, new materials with unique function can lead to new components for systems that are smaller, lighter in weight, requisite of less power and lower cost.Security and sensing systems must be versatile to work in a wide range of extreme environmental conditions such as in smoke, fog or in space.Other applications require more robust thermo-mechanical performance metrics, which much be evaluated in trade space to yield a viable solution for more rugged system needs.Materials that transmit light in the infrared portion of the electro-magnetic spectrum allows one to ‘see’ in these regions, often when visible imaging is not possible, but also to serve as windows if they are robust ‘enough’. How one transitions viable candidates from lab-scale demonstrators to commercial products takes an understanding of both science and engineering, manufacturability, and prioritization of attributes.This alignment with the end-customer needs must start early in the material design and development process, often well before the actual material solution is fully developed.

This talk reviews general aspects of how infrared glasses for bulk and planar film devices, glass ceramics as gradient refractive index (GRIN) media and alloys for optical phase change (O-PCM) have been designed, developed at prototype scale, and successfully transitioned from the university lab benchtop to the marketplace. These key outcomes suggest a methodology for how this could be done across other candidate optical material systems.