Técnicas de reconstrucción y compensación activa de frentes de onda complejos

Resumen

The continuous improvements of optical design tools and manufacturing technologies of free-form optical elements, allow the creation of new complex-shaped lenses that improve the performance of traditional optical systems and make possible new optical applications. The quality of fabrication of complex-shaped lenses depends on the possibility of measurement of the shape along the manufacturing process. Moreover, the measurement of the shape of fabricated lenses is a usual quality control process conducted by the manufacturing industry to ensure the quality of commercial lenses. The measurement of complex-shaped optical surfaces has been usually done with mechanical contact stylus, to get higher resolutions within the larger dynamic range required. However, stylus devices have important drawbacks as a slow measurement speed due to make a point by point measurement, and specially the risk of damage of extremely polished surfaces of the lenses due to the drag of the stylus across them. As opposed to those mechanical contact devices of measurement, there are several non destructive optical techniques like interferometry and deflectometry based on the Shack-Hartmann sensor of spherical microlenses, which are much faster due to make a full-field measurement in a single shot. Despite this advantage, these two techniques have a more limited dynamic range of measurement than stylus devices, which does not allow to measure most complex-shaped lenses. Therefore, solutions to extend the dynamic range of those full-field optical techniques are needed, like changing the conventional Shack-Hartmann’s array of microspheres for an array of more appropriate microlenses and the compensation of the tested lens by means of “inverse” additional optical elements to reduce its complexity. Otherwise, once an optical element has been tested, it is required to finally reconstruct its shape from the discrete data obtained in the measurement. In the lenses’ field, the modal Zernike representation is commonly used to reconstruct the shape. However, to describe complex shapes with steep local changes, zonal representations fit better. Among them, it must be mentioned the B-Spline representation, which is used by the ophthalmic lenses’ manufacturers in the design and modelling of complex progressive surfaces of lenses of this type. The current thesis describes various optical solutions to measure and represent the shape of commercial complex-shaped lenses, particularly applied to progressive addition lenses personalized to the user. The developed solutions are: - It is implemented the B-Spline cubic representation to reconstruct complex wavefronts and get direct information of their local amplitudes, by means of fitting the local wavefront slopes that output from a Shack-Hartmann wavefront sensor. It is compared the fitting quality of B-Spline and circular Zernike representations in a set of simulated wavefronts of different complexity. To quantify the fitting quality in similar conditions as experimentally, two complementary parameters which account for the differences between the reconstructed wavefront and the simulated wavefront with added noise (fitting RMS error) and between the reconstructed wavefront and the simulated wavefront without noise (wavefront RMS error) are used. The fitting quality is analyzed in terms of the degree of Zernike polynomial and in terms of the number of subzones that divides the whole wavefront domain (breakpoints) for the B-Spline representation. - It is developed a Shack-Hartmann wavefront sensor based on a cylindrical microlens array and a proprietary algorithm that processes the line patterns detected, to extend the dynamic range of the conventional Shack-Hartmann sensor of spherical microlenses. After making a conceptual design of the sensor and evaluating the performance of various configurations in terms of the measurement field, spatial resolution, vertical resolution and dynamic range by means of a proprietary ray trace program, two wavefront sensors are built: a first sensor with an unique array of microcylinders placed in a rotary mount that allows positioning the microcylinders in horizontal and vertical directions, and a second more evolved sensor with two equal arrays of microcylinders placed in horizontal and vertical directions, which reaches the same measurement speed as the Shack-Hartmann sensor of spherical microlenses. The sensor is applied to characterize by transmission a set of three different prescriptions commercial progressive addition lenses with designs customized to wearers that move their eyes, their head, and half the eyes and the head when doing a visual task. From the characterization process, the spatially resolved aberrations, the iso-power maps, the iso-cylinder maps and the cylinders’ axis maps of the lenses are obtained. - It is designed and built an active optics system to compensate the wavefront transmitted by complex-shaped lenses. As the active device to make the wavefront compensation, it is used a commercial phase-only modulator based on a parallel-aligned liquid crystal, which has the advantages of a high spatial resolution and an accurate response in open-loop mode. The response is characterized experimentally. As opposed to the abovementioned advantages, the phase modulator has the lack of decreasing its diffraction efficiency as increases the amplitude of the modulated phase. This means that non phase-modulated light, which corresponds to the zero order of diffraction that outputs from the modulator, is superimposed to phase-modulated light of interest. To solve this problem, a pinhole spatial filter that blocks the zero order diffraction light is implemented in the system. The active optics system is proposed as a dynamic null-test to make the quality control of complex-shaped lenses with a reduced cost in time and money over the traditional static null-tests. As a demonstration of the application, an active null-test of a commercial progressive addition lens personalized to the user with distance null power and two dioptres of addition is successfully made.