Achromatic air-spaced doublet automated design

Abstract

The air-spaced achromatic doublets are wildly used in imaging applications. Lens assemblies require time and effort in order to make sure that the chromatic and spherical aberrations are reduced as much as possible and the resulted system performance is at the expected level. This paper proposes a software application realized in MATLAB, capable of coming into the aid of the lens designer in obtaining the desired doublet with minimum effort. Based on some main parameters selected by the user such as lens materials, aperture of the system, air space and required focal length, the synthesis of the assembly is performed, the values of radii of curvature of the surfaces and thicknesses are calculated and displayed. 2D 1:1 scale representations of the lenses are generated and used to visualize the resulted system. As the material used for each lens is vital in the design process, the software application contains in its glass editable database a large variety of materials that can be chosen, this feature minimizing the effort in finding the needed input data. The paper also contains a presentation of the algorithm based on the fundamentals of literature used to develop the application and the analysis of the achromatic doublet solutions to prove its quality. This software could be of interest for any lens designer and can offer a solid basis in constructing air spaced doublet systems as it offers a fast, automated solution for the calculus of the design parameters that could be afterwords analyzed using a simulation soft-ware and optimization if necessary.