Optical design and optimization of a micro zoom system with liquid lenses

Abstract

A micro zoom system without moving elements by use of two liquid lenses is designed and optimized in this paper. The zoom equations of the system composed of two liquid lenses are deduced. The structure parameters including radius and thickness of a conical double-liquid electrowetting based lens are analyzed and calculated. Because the liquid thickness varies non-linearly with the radius of the interface, it's very difficult to optimize a real liquid lens using commercial optical design software directly. Through the Application Programming Interface (API) of the optical design software CODE V, a zoom system with two real electrowetting based liquid lenses is modeled and optimized. A two-liquid-lens zoom system without moving elements, with a zoom factor of 1.8 and a compact structure of 10 mm is designed for illustration. This can be useful for the camera design of mobile phones, tablets and so on. And this paper presents a convenient way of designing and optimizing a zoom system including liquid lenses by commercial optical design software.