Advances in the design and manufacturing of novel freeform optics

Freeform optics has become the most prominent element of the optics industry. Advanced freeform optical designs supplementary to ultra-precision manufacturing and metrology techniques have upgraded the lifestyle, thinking, and observing power of existing humans.Imaginations related to space explorations, portability, accessibility have also witnessed sensible in today’s time with freeform optics. Present-day design methods and fabrications techniques applicable in the development of freeform optics and the market requirements are focussed and explained with the help of traditional and non-traditional optical applications. Over the years,significant research is performed in the emerging field of freeform optics, but no standards are established yet in terms of tolerances and definitions. We critically review the optical design methods for freeform optics considering the image forming and non-image forming applications. Numerous subtractive manufacturing technologies including figure correction methods and metrology have been developed to fabricate extreme modern freeform optics to satisfy the demands of various applications such as space, astronomy, earth science, defence,biomedical, material processing, surveillance, and many more. We described a variety of advanced technologies in manufacturing and metrology for novel freeform optics. Next, we also covered the manufacturing-oriented design scheme for advanced optics. We conclude this review with an outlook on the future of freeform optics design, manufacturing and metrology.

Optical design of a compact and high-transmittance compressive sensing imaging system enabled by freeform optics

Using compressive sensing for imaging has many applications, and it is an important branch of computational imaging.In this Letter, freeform surfaces are introduced in the hardware optical system design of a compressive sensing imager. The system works under the medium wave infrared band and realizes a 16× compression with a field-of-view of 7.5°× 6°. Good imaging performance is achieved in both the entire system and the freeform objective optics. Compared with the system using all spherical lenses, the volume of the freeform system is about 1/3 smaller, and the total transmittance is about 56%higher, which shows the benefits of using freeform surfaces for compressive sensing and computational imaging.

Iterative freeform lens design for prescribed irradiance on curved target

Current freeform illumination optical designs are mostly focused on producing prescribed irradiance distributions on planar targets.Here,we aim to design freeform optics that could generate a desired illumination on a curved target from a point source,which is still a challenge.We reduce the difficulties that arise from the curved target by involving its varying z-coordinates in the iterative wavefront tailoring(IWT)procedure.The new IWT-based method is developed under the stereographic coordinate system with a special mesh transformation of the source domain,which is suitable for light sources with light emissions in semi space such as LED sources.The first example demonstrates that a rectangular flat-top illumination can be generated on an undulating surface by a spherical-freeform lens for a Lambertian source.The second example shows that our method is also applicable for producing a non-uniform irradiance distribution in a circular region of the undulating surface.

Freeform spectrometer enabling increased compactness

We present optical designs with freeform optics in the context of hyperspectral imaging.Results show designs that are 5×more compact in volume than similar designs using conventional spherical or aspherical surfaces.We will show how combining the concepts of spatial and spectral-band broadening,which will be introduced in this paper,led to the improvement in compactness that is uniquely enabled by freeform optics.