Tunable fluidic lenses with high dioptric power

We report a complete theoretical model and supporting experimental results on the fabrication and characterization of macroscopic adaptive fluidic lenses with high dioptric power, tunable focal distance, and aperture shape. The lens is 17 mm wide and is made of an elastic polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) polymer, which can adaptively restore accommodation distance within several cm according to the fluidic volume mechanically pumped in. Moreover, the lens can provide for magnification in the range of +25 diopter to +100 diopter with optical aberrations within a fraction of a wavelength, and overall lens weight of less than 2 g. The agreement between the non-linear theoretical model describing the elastic membrane deformation and the experimental results is apparent. We stress that these features make the proposed lenses appropriate for the low vision segment, as well as for applications in video magnifiers, camera zooms, telescope and microscopes objectives, and other machine vision applications where large magnification is required.