2.

The work of the lens designer

The process of optical design can be considered an art and a science. There is no closed
algorithm that creates a lens, nor there is any computer program that will create useful lens
designs without right direction from an optical designer. The mechanics of computation are
available within a computer program, but the inspiration and work for useful solutions to a
customer’s problems come from the lens designer. A successful design includes a combination
of techniques and technologies that best meet the goals of the customer. The final decision is
directed by the experience of the designer.

In order to construct a lens, it must be first designed, that is, the radii of curvature of the
surfaces, the thickness, the air spaces, the diameters of the various components, and the types
of glasses to be used, must all be determined and specified. The reason for the complexity in
lenses is that in the ideal case that all the rays in all wavelengths originating at a given object
point should be made to pass accurately through the image of that object point, and the image
of a plane object should be a plane, without any appearance of distortion in the images of
straight lines. Scientists always try to break down a complex situation into its constituent parts,
and lenses are no exception. For several hundred years various so-called aberrations have
been recognized in the imperfect image formed by a lens, each of which can be varied by
changing the lens structure. Typical monochromatic aberrations are spherical, coma, curvature
of field, astigmatism and distortion, and chromatic aberration, but in any given lens all the
aberration appear mixed together, and correcting one aberration will improve the resulting
image only to the extend of the amount of the particular aberration in the overall mixture.
Some aberrations can easily vary by changing a shape of one ore more of the lens elements,
while others require a drastic alteration of the entire system.

The lens parameters available to the designer for change are known as degree of freedom.
They include all form parameters of lens, as radii curvature, thickness, and airspace, the
refractive indices and dispersion powers of the glasses used for the separate lens elements,
and position of the aperture stop (The aperture stop is represented by a physical aperture
placed on a surface within the lens.) or aperture-limiting diaphragm or lens mount. However, it
is also necessary to maintain the required focal length of the lens at all times, for otherwise the
relative aperture and image height would vary and the designer might end up with a good lens
but not the one he set out to design. Hence each structural change that we make must be
accompanied by some other change to hold the focal length constant. Also, if the lens is to be
used at a fixed magnification, that magnification must be maintaining throughout the design.

If it starts by looking at a lens design, the parameters describing the field size, axial aperture
and image size are first order properties of the lens. In a perfect lens these properties would
be needed to describe the image formation, as each point on the object would be represented
as a perfect point in the image. This is as far as simple optics needs to go. If image formation
were the aberration free once the selection of the image scale, location, and brightness were
stated, there would be no difficulty in lens design. But the reality is that the laws of
geometrical and physical optics do not permit the formation of a perfect image except in a
very small number of simple cases. Image formation will be limited by aberration intrinsic to
the passage of light through the lens. One measure of the aberration is the size of the blur of
rays surrounding the central ray through the aperture stop. Another is the amount to which
the optical path along each ray in a bundle through the lens differs from the optical path along
the central ray from the object. The aberrations are also dependent upon the color or
wavelength of the light within each ray bundle, and by the distortion in the image, or the
extend to which the central ray of each bundle fails to intersect at each image point
determined by the first-order optical description of the image.

The laws of geometrical optics determine the passage of rays through a lens system. The laws
of physical optics determine how the light within each bundle combines to form an image of
each point. The description of a lens in terms of aberrations and image quality can be
calculated to any desired accuracy. All of the descriptions are based upon numerical
computation, and are only approximately represented by analytic equations. A closed form
analytic description of the image forming process does not exist for a practical lens. This is due
to the nonlinearity relating the angles of incidence and refraction of each ray, and because of
the complexity in computing the physical image due diffraction of light.

The lens designer that is working with a very complicated system of physical components can
be described in numerical detail. The complexity is such that are possibly hundreds or even
thousands of closely equivalent solutions for each set of parameters provided by the customer
for the lens. Thus, although the scientific or technical description of the lens can be expressed
to any accuracy by using a computer, the artistry of the lens designer is required to guide the
design process and select the best solution from the great number of possible close fits to the
required lens parameters.

The artistry part of designs extends beyond the selection of the image quality to include the
mechanical layout, selection of materials and minimization of problems with tolerance
required for fabricating a successful lens. A high-speed computer permits optimization to
proceed very rapidly. In the usual case, hundred of possible design can be evaluated in an
hour, and the optimum selection of these made by use of a computer program. Few of these
are desirable or acceptable solutions. Only in a very small number of cases can the design be
completed without application of the judgment of a designer to guide the outcome of the
computer program.

The lens designer must establish good relations with the factory because after all, the designed
lens must be manufactured. He should be familiar with various manufacturing processes and
work closely with the optical engineers. He must always keep in mind that lens cost money,
and he should therefore use as few of them as possible if cost is a serious factor. If the image
quality is the most important consideration, there is no limit placed on the complexity or size
of a lens. Far more often the designer is urged to economize by using fewer elements, flatter
lens surface so that more lenses can be polished on a single block, lower-priced types of glass,
and thicker lens elements since they are easier to hold by the edge in the various
manufacturing operations.

In almost all cases the designer is restricted to the use of spherical refracting or reflecting
surfaces, regarding the plane as a sphere of infinite radius. The standard lens manufacturing
processes generate a spherical surface with great accuracy, but attempts to broaden the
designer’s freedom by permitting the use of aspheric surfaces lead to extremely difficult
manufacturing problems, consequently such surfaces are used only when no other solution
can be found.

The designer must know that the negative lens elements should be have a center thickness
between 6 and 10% of the lens diameter, but the establishment of the thickness of a positive
lens requires much more considerations. The glass blank from which the lens is made must
have an edge thickness of at least 1 mm to enable it to be held during the grinding and
polishing operations. At least 1 mm will be removed in edging the lens to its trim diameter, and
it must allow at least another 1 mm in radius for support in the mount. With these allowances
in mind, and knowing the surface curvatures, the minimum acceptable center thickness of a
positive lens can be determined. These specific limitations refer to a lens of average size, say ½
to 3 in. in diameter, they may be somewhat reduced for small lenses, and they must be
increase for large ones. As general rule, weak lens surfaces are cheaper to make than strong
surfaces because more lenses can be polished together on a block. However, if only a single
lens is to be made, multiple blocks will not be use, and then a strong surface is no more
expensive than a weak one. Another point is that a very small separation between two lenses
is hard to achieve, and it is better either to let the lenses actually touch a diameter slightly
greater than the clear aperture or to call for a edge separation of 1 mm or more, which can be
achieve by a spacer ring or a rigid part of the mounting.

All glass-air lens surfaces are given an antireflection coating to improve the light transmission
and to eliminate ghost images. Since many lenses can be coated together, the process is not
expensive, but for the most complete elimination of surface reflection over a wide wavelength
range, a multilayer coating is required, and the cost then immediately rises.

The reasons for cementing lenses together are to eliminating two surfaces reflection losses, to
prevent total reflection at the air film and to aid in mounting by combining two strong
elements into a single, much weaker cemented doublet. The relative centering of the two
strong elements is accomplished during the cementing operation rather in the lens mount.

It is essential for the lens designer to assign a tolerance to every dimension of a lens. This
remark applies to radii, thickness, airspaces, surface quality, glass index and dispersion, lens
diameters, and centering. These tolerances are generally found by applying a small error to
each parameter, and tracing sufficient rays through the altered lens to determine the effects of
the error. A knowledge of the tolerances on the glass index and dispersion may make the
difference between being able to use a stock of glass on hand, or the necessity of ordering
glass with an unusually tight tolerance, which may seriously delay production and raise the
cost of the lens. When making a single high quality lens, it is customary to design with catalog
indices, then order the glass and make use of actual glass received from the manufacturing. On
the hand, when designing a high-production lens, it is necessary to adapt the design to the
normal factory variation of about 0,001 in refractive index and 0,2 in dispersion power. Very
often the most important tolerances to specify are those for surface tilt and the lens element
decentration. The knowledge of these can have a great effect on the design of the mounting
and on the manufacturing of the system. A decentered lens generally shows coma on the axis,
whereas a tilted element often leads to a tilted field. Some surfaces are affected very little by a
small tilt, whereas others may be extremely sensitive in this regard. A table of tilt coefficients
should be in the hands of the optical engineers before they begin the work on the mounting
design.

It should be evident by now that successful design is more than computer program
manipulation. Conversely, an understanding of how to creatively use the process of
computerized optimization is essential to successful designing. The art of the designer begins
with definition of the starting point. No matter how effective the optimization process, an
inappropriate selection of starting point can lead to failure in the design. As the design
proceeds, alteration of the request goals is important. The designer needs to learn from the
steps taken by the optimization process what the limitations are for the lens, and how the
parameters and the merit function describing the goals can best be altered. Understanding of
the basis of geometrical optics and aberration content in lenses is essential to knowing when
to stop. Continuing to attempt to optimize a lens whose image forming capabilities cannot be
improved is inefficient and costly. The successful optical design is more than mere computer
operation and interpretation of ray tracing. The successful designer must be aware of many
properties of lenses that will affect the eventual outcome of the design.

A closed mathematical solution for the constructional data of the lens in terms of its desired
performance would be much more too complex to be a real possibility. The best it can do its to
use the knowledge of optics to set up a likely first approach to the desired lens, analyze and
evaluate it, make judicious changes, optimize, reevaluates it, and so on. The process may be
illustrated by simple flow chart. These steps will be considered in turn, in Figure 2.1.

Set up a first system

Analyze and evaluate its performance

YES
Is it good enough? END

NO

Input changes in the system

Optimize the system

Figure 2.1: Lens design flow chart.

The type of lens that is selected needs to be characterized by the requirements of customer.
There are many hidden considerations, such as the focal length, weight, spectral range, and
actual required image quality that will affect the choice of lens type. The number of elements
permitted also influences the type of lens that is used, as available space and cost are two of
the continuos difficulty to express limits that are used in design. The design of specific known
type of lens indicates how this selection process is developed, and permits modification of the
starting configuration by the designer. In many cases, the starting point can be obtained from a
basic optical layout, beginning with a first-order calculation. For more complicated lenses the
best starting point is usually prior art. In most of cases this will be from a lens data library or a
lens patent.

Mechanical and fabrication requirements deal with the need to be able to produce a lens if it is
to be of any use to the customer. The tolerances break into three parts. The first are the
requirements on construction parameters to ensure that the image falls in the proper location
and contains aberrations within an acceptable degradation from the base system. The second
deals with the need to use the lens in a defined environment. The third specifies the
acceptable irregularity and randomness that can be allowed on the surfaces of the lens to
control both aberrations and scattered light. Specification of these tolerances requires running
a simulation of the design of the lens, in which the computer perturbs the state of the lens
according to specific algorithms and calculates the probability that any lens assembly within
the tolerances will meet the requirements. The final set of specifications deals with the others
important requirements, as the cost and schedule for delivery. Success in meeting these
specifications actually is very closely tied to the choice of the parameter and tolerances that
are needed for the lens.

The design process can be stopped when the design goals are met. Usually, this is when the
image produced by a lens is good enough to meet the needs of the customer. Just stopping the
design is not sufficient to complete the task. Fabrication tolerances must be provided to build
the lens. Establishing appropriate tolerances is often more difficult than the actual design of
lens. The allowable fabrication errors that will provide image quality within desired levels are
found from a statistical analysis of possible combinations of each individual error. These are
stated in terms that may be measured by a shop fabrication and assembling the lens
components. A drawing of the lens and lens elements that contain these tolerances is
delivered as the result of the design process. Modern lens analysis methods provide a
sufficient basis for predicting performance of a lens built as specified. There is an art as well as
a science to identifying the sources of problem and failures. The designer needs to be able to
relate the knowledge obtained during the design to the practical difficulties involved in
manufacturing a lens.