Adaptive liquid lens focuses on electrically responsive fluid

According to the team, the lens is suitable for mobile phone cameras, endoscopes, eyeglasses and machine vision applications because it is lightweight, compact and simple to fabricate.

“The human eye can arbitrarily focus on objects at different distances at incredibly fast speeds,” said research team leader Miao Xu from Hefei University of Technology. “Inspired by this functionality, we developed an eye-like adaptive liquid lens that can be used to diverge or converge light by changing the shape of the DBA liquid.”

In Optics Letters, the researchers describe their new DBA-based adaptive liquid lens, which weighs a few grams, and show that it exhibits high optical performance with good stability. DBA’s electronegative molecular structure allows an applied voltage to be used to rapidly change the lens’ shape to modify its focal length. DBA is also said to be transparent, non-volatile and inexpensive, which qualifies it for use in adaptive liquid lenses.