Realization of a cost-effective 3D-printed lens for aberration correction for visible spectrum imaging

Abstract

Achromats represent a widely employed optical component in optical design and engineering. Traditionally, an achromat consists of a pairing of two lenses: a positively refracting crown glass element and a negatively refracting flint glass element, which are cascaded together. The Cooke triplet comprises three distinct lenses arranged at a finite separation distance to control the aberrations. However, the glass materials employed in their construction are costly and necessitate access to a specialized fabrication facility for shaping their structure for custom design. In this study, we demonstrate the feasibility of removing aberrations using cheap, single material like transparent epoxy resin, exhibiting a refractive index of 1.55. We fabricated 3D molds for the lenses and subsequently filled them with resin, producing lenses. These lenses' straightforward and cost-effective production demonstrates that custom designs can be created without requiring specialized fabrication facilities. The lens design started with the lens maker equation and was further optimized in the ray tracing software Opticstudio Zemax. The Seidel diagrams and focal shift graphs provided empirical evidence of our successful aberration reduction, highlighting that we effectively mitigated up to 74% of aberrations. At the same time, complete elimination of aberrations through using a single material is unattainable. The production of these lenses will contribute to the realization of cost-effective imaging systems, lens assemblies, and 3D-printed camera setups.