Graphical Selection of Optical Materials Using an Expanded Athermal Glass Map and Considering the Housing Material for an Athermal and Achromatic Design

Abstract

This paper presents a new graphical method for selecting a pair of optical glass and housing materials to simultaneously achromatize and athermalize a multilens system composed of many elements. To take into account the lens spacing and housing, we quantify the lens power, chromatic power, and thermal power by weighting the ratio of the paraxial ray height at each lens to them. In addition, we introduce the equivalent single lens and the expanded athermal glass map including a housing material. Even though a lens system is composed of many elements, we can simply identify a pair of glass and housing materials that satisfies the athermal and achromatic conditions. Applying this method to design a black box camera lens equipped with a 1/4-inch image sensor having a pixel width of $2{\mu}m$ , the chromatic and thermal defocusings are reduced to less than the depth of focus, over the specified ranges in temperature and frequency.