Design and fabrication of compound varifocal lens driven by polydimethylsiloxane film elastic deformation

A compound varifocal lens based on electromagnetic drive technology is designed and fabricated, where the polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) film acts as a driving component, while the PDMS biconvex lens and the plane-concave lens form a coaxial compound lens system. The plane-concave lens equipped with driving coils is installed directly above the PDMS lens surrounded by the annular magnet. When different currents are applied, the annular magnet moves up and down, driving the PDMS film to undergo elastic deformation, and then resulting in longitudinal movement of the PDMS lens. The position change of the PDMS lens changes the focal length of the compound lens system. To verify the feasibility and practicability of this design, a prototype of our compound lens system is fabricated in experiment. Our proposed compound lens shows that its zoom ability reaches 9.28 mm when the current ranges from −0.20 A to 0.21 A.