Software application for automated lens and lens assembly synthesis

Abstract

The calculus of parameters for lens design is quite complex and time consuming and very few software applications which can offer support in this mater are available to the wide public. Most optical design software programs are rather simulation programs that are able to determine the quality of the optical system, helpful in making design decisions or offering optimization features but they do not offer the possibility to actually design from scratch such entities. The paper presents a software application realized in MATLAB for basic optical entities synthesis (single lens, cemented doublet, air-spaced doublet, cemented triplet) based on fundamentals in literature. The application is also capable of giving a rough analysis of several aberrations of the optical system and generate 2D representations for the lenses. It contains a predefined glass database that incorporates information about a wide variety of materials from manufacturers catalogs and also a buildable database where the users can add their favorite choice of materials and save them for future designs. The software has also multiple simple tools such as graphical representation of Ray-Tracing for a marginal ray passing through a lens, graphical representation of angles of incidence and refraction based on Snell`s Law and even a camera parameter calculator useful for optical applications such as robotics. The application can represent a solid basis and hand-book for designing from very simple to more complex optical systems with minimum effort, it is time saving and user friendly, appropriate for experienced designers but also cand be used as didactic material especially for students in the optical filed as it offers tools for understanding some basic optical principles.