Patent 10185182 was granted and assigned to Beam Engineering For Advanced Measurements Co. on January, 2019 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
Cycloidal boundary conditions for aligning liquid crystalline materials are obtained by mechanical rubbing of a polymer coating. The rubbing is performed by a rubbing head rotating around an axis perpendicular to the rubbing plane while the alignment polymer film is being translated across the rubbing film such as only a linear portion of the alignment film touches the rubbing film at any given time.