Freeform optical design of beam shaping systems with variable illumination properties

Abstract

Freeform optics constitutes a new technology that is currently driving substantial changes in beam shaping. Most of the current beam shaping systems are elaborately tailored for fixed optical properties, which means the output light distribution of a beam shaping system usually cannot be changed. What we present here is a class of beam shaping systems, the optical properties of which can be changed to meet the requirements for different applications. The proposed beam shaping system is composed of a freeform lens and a non-classical zoom system which is designed by ray aiming and the conservation of energy instead of aberration control. The freeform lens includes two elaborately designed freeform optical surfaces, by which both the intensity distribution and wave-front of an incident light beam are manipulated in a desired manner. The light beam after propagating through the non-classical zoom system produces an illumination pattern on a fixed observation plane with a variable pattern size and an unchanged irradiance distribution at different zoom positions. Two design examples are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed beam shaping systems.