Introduction

On this page:

Glass selection is one of the most important jobs of the optical designer, but it is easy to become overwhelmed by the number of glasses available in the different catalogs.

Glass selection is involved in the process of achromatization and athermalization of an optical design, but it also influences the amount of aberrations present in the system. We propose different tools to help in the selection process including:

A general glass table with all the currently selected glasses;
A plot showing the refractive indices of glasses compared to their dispersion (Abbe number);
A partial dispersion plot which is useful in the achromatization process to select glasses that have lower secondary spectrum. The partial dispersion plot is particularly useful when designing achromatic doublets and achromatic triplets;
Thermal and (V, θ) charts which are useful in the athermalization process of doublets and triplets elements. The (V, θ) chart is designed for doublet athermalization specifically;
A detailed description of all the properties of each glasses such as general properties, thermal, mechanical, stress/birefringence properties and environmental resistance;
Refractive index, dispersion and transmission plots relative to wavelength for each glass.

The different charts are available under the secondary toolbar:

Glasses can be removed from the selection by either clicking on the data point in the plots or by disabling them directly in the glass table window. Removal can be undone using the undo and reset buttons of the interface. Similarly, each plot can be saved either as .png image or as a .csv spreadsheet:

Glass selection can be further restricted by applying filters on cost, transmission boundaries, thermal and mechanical properties, environmental resistances and miscellaneous features like lead content, radiation resistance etc.

Finally, glass plots can be tuned through various options to control dispersion computation, (V, θ) chart thermal targets, and wavelengths limits for glass plots.