Design and fabrication of compound varifocal lens driven by polydimethylsiloxane film elastic deformation

Abstract

A compound varifocal lens based on electromagnetic drive technology is designed and fabricated, where the PDMS film acts as the driving component, while the PDMS biconvex lens and the plane-concave lens form a coaxial compound lens system. The plane-concave lens equipped with driving coils is installed directly above the PDMS lens surrounded by the annular magnet. When applying different currents, the annular magnet moves up and down, driving the PDMS film to undergo elastic deformation and then resulting in the longitudinal movement of the PDMS lens. The position change of the PDMS lens changes the focal length of the compound lens system. To verify the feasibility and practicability of this design, a prototype of our compound lens system is fabricated in experiment. Our proposed compound lens performs zoom ability up to 9.28mm when the current ranges from -0.20 to 0.21A.