Uses and Benefits of auto collimators for optical assemblies explained
Using Auto-Collimators for Optical Assemblies
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lens design
Optical design using liquid lenses
Liquid lenses, are a type of optical lens that utilizes an electronically controlled liquid droplet to change its shape and hence alter its focal length. These lenses are based on electrowetting technology, which involves manipulating the surface tension of a...
Understanding Paraxial Lenses
Paraxial Lenses Paraxial lenses are a simplified model used to analyze and design optical systems, particularly lenses. In the paraxial approximation, light rays passing through a lens are assumed to be close to the optical axis and at small angles with respect...
3 Rules For Plano Convex Lens Design
Plano convex lenses are lenses with a positive focal length and while they are simple compared to many optical systems, but there are fine details that a lens designer needs to pay attention to. This post will review 3 key rules for designing a plano convex lens
3 Keys To Quality Double Gaussian Lens Design
One of the most common lens system designs- especially in photography- is what is called a Double Gaussian lens. There are several different configurations, and close to 90 different patents have been filed from 1936 – 2010. One of the reasons this lens design configuration is so popular is that it corrects many of the major image aberrations with a relatively low number of optical elements.
3 Strategies for Field Lens Development and Design
Field lenses are a basic element in optical design, to understand their role in an optical system it’s important first to understand the definitions of Field-of-View (FOV). Generally speaking, FOV is the maximum size of an object that an optical system can create an...
Retinoscope Design
Retinoscopes are a very common optical instrument 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...
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 Apochromatic lens...
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, and one of the most common is the cylindrical lens. What’s the difference between spherical and geometrical lenses? And what...
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...
