Effect of Material Properties on Optical Adaptation

To gain insight into the effect of material properties on the passive adaptation of our elastic lens array, we used the finite element analysis program Abaqus to simulate lens arrays made of various optically clear elastomers and plotted their stress distributions. For the materials available in the market, the Poisson's ratio (a unit of incompressibility) varied from 0.48 to 0.49, and the Shore Hardness A (a unit hardness) varied from 5 to 90. We have found that, although the hardness of the material will affect the stress distribution, it does not affect the relationship between curvature, lens thickness and lens radius. In short, the optical adaptation of the lens array is more or less independent of its hardness. With respect to the Poisson's ratio, we found that as long as the ratio is close to 0.5, the lens array will exhibit the desired optical adaptation.