Design for Manufacturability with reTORT Optimization Wizards
Design for Manufacturability is essential in any optical lens design. With our reTORT ray tracer software, you have the advantage of quick optimization. Our wizards simplify your design setup.
After reading this, we recommend you watch our GRIN SWaP reduction video tutorial. You can read more about SWaP reduction on our blog.
Lens Thickness is Critical
Lens thickness is a key factor in manufacturable design.
Often, lenses are manufactured with oversized diameters. This allows for additional precision in the grinding and polishing steps. Errors and defects in the manufacturing process are easily removed. However, lenses with thin edges have less room for grinding.
In addition, lens designs must not be too thin in the center. Otherwise, the lens may warp or fracture during polishing.
These factors lead to lower yield for high precision optical lens designs.
Our reTORT ray tracer software easily avoids these problems. You can easily limit center and edge thicknesses with our optimization wizards. All it takes is one click. These tools optimize your optical lens design within your manufacturing capability.
The optimization wizards integrate design for manufacturing into your logical design workflow. The result is a manufacturable design.
Example Lens Thickness Constraints
A diffraction-limited Cooke triplet design is shown below. This design has a 100-mm focal length. No thickness constraints were specified for the optimization.
This design is unrealistic as you can see in the table below. This design is not manufacturable.
Don’t Waste Time – Use Our Optimization Wizard
You can eliminate wasted time by using our optimization wizard to set minimum thicknesses. Please see below. Our wizards just require a click in a box and entering the minimum value.
In this way, you easily guide the optical lens design toward a realistic diameter to thickness ratio.
Below is the result of the optimized Cooke triplet with the constrained lens thicknesses.
This new design remains diffraction-limited at a focal length of 100mm. And, it has a 14-degree angular field of view.
As you can see, reTORT’s optimization wizard and lens thickness constraints simplify design. As a result, they also produce a realistic design. We allow you to easily optimize lenses based on your own manufacturing requirements.
By the way, you may also enjoy our post on Seidel versus Zernicke when working to minimize aberrations.
Get Your Free Trial
The reTORT Ray Tracer is available on a no commitment, no credit card required free trial. Get yours now and give the reTORT ray tracer a try.
Deep Discounts for Education,Training, Hobbyists and Personal Use
You can obtain E x H Software for less than the price of a textbook. The non-commercial license is less than the cost of the cheapest lens in that telescope you’re designing and building for pleasure. Please see how on our site.
About E x H, Inc.
Our mission is to provide you with advanced simulation tools. These tools allow you to design optical and RF systems that are smaller, lighter, faster and have greater clarity than ever before.
We license some of our solvers from Penn State University. PSU’s world reknowned Computational Electromagnetics and Antennas Research Laboratory. have developed these solvers.
Many of our scientists and engineers have been educated at CEARL.
We have also participated on multiple programs funded by DARPA as well as other sectors of the Department of Defense.
On the business side, we have been backed by Gran Sasso Ventures, the same venture capitalists that funded collaboration software firm Compoze Software, now a part of Oracle [ORCL:NYSE], and multitouch technology inventor FingerWorks, the driver of touch screen technology and now a part of Apple [AAPL:NASDAQ].
E x H is at the forefront of transformation optics.
