Optical systems with high tolerance sensitivity can be significantly affected by errors in manufacturing and assembly. By discussing the change in the ray position on the image surface caused by the system tolerance, we propose a scheme by controlling the change of the chief ray on the image surface as little as possible with the chief ray drift, which is called the stability of the chief ray, to reduce the tolerance sensitivity. The effectiveness of the method is demonstrated by a design example. Since it is based on controlling the real rays of the optical system, this method can theoretically be applied to all optical systems design.
During the production of a new designed lens system, overweighted assembling and manufacturing errors can cause the degradation of the performance of the whole system. Therefore, optimizations to improve the assembling and manufacturing tolerances sensitivity are greatly required in lens design industry. Following the principle of Gaussian optics, there are some practical implications of the first order derivatives which are of great significance to analyse the sensitivity of a lens system with its structural parameters changing. It is demonstrated that manufacturing errors, such as tilting, decentering and so on, induce the real rays' height shifting on each surface of an imaging system, which subsequently induces the decline of image quality. Thus, we proposed a scheme to use the first order derivatives of the height of a real ray on the image surface in a lens system versus that on the pupil surface, which indicate the height variations of the real ray on the image surface of the lens system caused by the displacement of its corresponding height on the pupil surface, as a merit function to improve the tolerance sensitivity of the whole system. A test program using the ZPL language in Opticstudio has preliminarily confirmed the effectiveness of our proposed methods. And as it is aimed at controlling the real rays of a lens system to reduce its sensitivity according to assembling and manufacturing errors, our scheme is theoretically able to appropriate to all lens design systems.
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