Optimization strategies for apressurized, athermal, and achromatic lens designs

This paper explores a solution space when posed with a challenging lens design problem such as achieving an achromatic, passively athermal and an apressurized performance in refractive optics. Investigations on the design space include both imaging and afocal refractive telescopes. A design study on the minimum number of lenses required to achieve an arbitrarily specified magnification, the interplay between the housing materials, selection of glass types and their material properties required to simultaneously tackle pressure, temperature and wavelength invariance has been conducted with Zemax OpticsStudio. The study also highlights how pressure invariance scales with the pupil diameter. Optimization approaches when further constraints on the size and mass of the ’as-built’ design come into play, have been discussed.