PROCEEDINGS ARTICLE | October 8, 2015
Proc. SPIE. 9678, AOPC 2015: Telescope and Space Optical Instrumentation
KEYWORDS: Actuators, Optical components, Mirrors, Roads, Cell phones, Cameras, Silicon, Objectives, Finite element methods, Prototyping
Recently, a new kind of optical zooming technique in which no moving elements are involved has been paid much attention. The elimination of moving elements makes optical zooming suitable for applications which has exacting requirements in space, power cost and system stability. The mobile phone and the space-borne camera are two typical examples. The key to realize non-moving elements optical zooming lies in the introduction of variable curvature mirror (VCM) whose radius of curvature could be changed dynamically. When VCM is about to be used to implement optical zoom imaging, two characteristics should be ensured. First, VCM has to provide large enough saggitus variation in order to obtain a big magnification ratio. Second, after the radius of curvature has been changed, the corresponding surface figure accuracy should still be maintained superior to a threshold level to make the high quality imaging possible. In this manuscript, based on the elasticity theory, the physical model of the annular force based variable curvature mirror is established and numerically analyzed. The results demonstrate that when the annular force is applied at the half-the-aperture position, the actuation force is reduced and a smaller actuation force is required to generate the saggitus variation and thus the maintenance of surface figure accuracy becomes easier during the variation of radius of curvature. Besides that, a prototype VCM, whose diameter and thickness are 100mm and 3mm respectively, have been fabricated and the maximum saggitus variation that could be obtained approaches more than 30 wavelengths. At the same time, the degradation of surface figure accuracy is weakly correlated to the curvature radius variation. Keywords: optical zooming; variable curvature mirror; surface figure accuracy; saggitus;
