检眼镜是一种很常见的光学仪器used by optometrists to examine a patient’s eye and evaluate the need of corrective lenses. They use a very interesting physical principle. Let’s first describe the optical instrument. The retinoscope is a hand held...
lens design
Understanding objective lenses
Introduction In previous entries, we have talked about the design of scanning microscopes, infinity corrected microscopes, confocal microscope design, and Koehler illumination systems-a common illumination system in microscopes. The most essential microscope element...
Powell Lens Design
Previous posts have reviewed different techniques for beam homogenization as well as the difference between spot size and beam angle. This post will review a method for beam shaping using Powell Lenses. Powell lenses are lenses that create a straight laser line by...
Conoscopic Lens Design
A conoscopic lens is an instrument that can be used to measure the angular distribution of a light source. Its use is quite different from a lens, as in photography. An image created by a conoscopic lens resembles that of a fisheye lens. That is a...
Tessar Lens Design
Among the many lens design configurations, one of the most common lens optical layouts is the Tessar Lens. This layout was created by Paul Rudolph in 1902 for photographic lenses. In the golden age of film photography, the...
Projection Lens Design
Projection systems are one of the most common consumer optical devices (probably second to photographic systems). They allow us to view images on a screen (usually) by magnifying and projecting them at distances from a few centimeters to several meters away...
Apochromatic Lens Design
In an achromatic lens design, we optimize such that two wavelengths, usually red (590nm) and blue (495nm), focus on the same image plane. This is done to reduce chromatic aberration. In this article, we’ll talk about a similar design type called an...
How the Abbe Sine Condition impacts optical designs
When making first order optical design calculations, most engineers use parameters based on paraxial (or ideal) systems. That is, lenses in which the chief rays are very close to the optical axis. However, that’s not always the case, and as we move...
How F-Theta Lenses work ( & when to use one)
In a scanning system, a laser beam moves linearly in one or two dimensions by usually using a galvanometer or scan mirrors. The focused laser can then be used for engraving images in different materials, and drilling, cutting or other applications. However, when...
LIDAR Lens Design
Not all optical systems require sharp images and low aberrations. While imaging systems use MTF, Strehl ratio and wavefront error to evaluate quality, there are other systems like solar collectors where there is no image formation and the goal is to maximize the...
Common telecentric lens design layouts
What is a Telecentric Lens ?An important goal in machine vision applications is taking measurements in a consistent, accurate, and precise manner. This can include measuring the dimensions of manufactured parts to guarantee they are within the...
5 Applications of Cylindrical Lenses
When thinking of a ‘lens’, most people have the image of a spherical lens in their mind, but there are different geometries for lenses. One very common geometry is that of cylindrical lenses. What’s the difference between spherical and geometrical lenses? And why do...
Design considerations for microlenses and lensarrays
As optical systems are reduced in size, we encounter new engineering challenges when analyzing and designing lenses. These are issues that we usually don’t see when working with larger elements. This article will review some of the challenges when designing...
Interpreting Lens Spot Diagrams
As optical engineers, we use different tools and techniques to evaluate the performance of an optical design when simulating the system in a ray tracing program. One of those tools are spot diagrams. They may be a little bit confusing to use at first but are an...
How Aspheric and Freeform lenses work
A key aspect of an optical product development is the creation of a quality optical system design optimized to reduce aberrations and system cost. In an attempt to reach a balance between cost and performance, optical designers have created lenses with different...
Benefits of Zemax’s Black Box Lenses
When integrating off the shelf lenses into optical systems, it is essential to have full information about how a lens will perform with other elements in the system. When multiple component vendors ( ie electronics, mechanical, optical) are involved, data...
Scanning and Fluorescent Microscope Design Steps
Microscopy is a fundamental technique used to analyze samples that are too small to be perceived without magnification. It is used in multiple sciences, from biology, medicine, chemistry to anthropology, and any science where small samples are...
Types of Optical Designs used for Rifle Scopes
Autumn is almost here and with that, hunting season. Hunting is so popular in my state that it is a non-official holiday where school is “canceled” and congress gets the day off. I’m not sure if that happens elsewhere but it is fair to say that hunting is a big part...
Achromatic doublet design and optimization
Basic Concepts One of the most common optical structures is the achromatic doublet. It is used to reduce chromatic aberrations. At its most basic, it is a two lens system configuration where one lens is a concave lens, usually made of a flint glass, and the other is...
4 Essential Opto-mechanical Design examples
Opto mechanical design overview and definitions Opto mechanical design is an engineering specialty related to the positioning of optical elements such as lenses, filters, beamsplitters, reflectors, and diffractive elements in mechanical structures that will...
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