Joint glass–housing material optimization for athermal optical design via multi-objective strategy

Abstract

Conventional athermal optical design methods typically follow a sequential process of selecting optical glass materials first, followed by the housing material. However, if the selected housing material turns out to be unsuitable, the entire design process must be restarted, resulting in high iteration cost and reduced efficiency. To overcome this limitation, we propose a novel athermal optical design method based on a multi-objective collaborative framework for the joint selection of lens and housing material combinations. This approach enables one-step selection of glass combinations tailored to different housing materials. A novel Athermal Glass Map is constructed to unify the system’s thermal defocus, chromatic aberration, and spherical aberration responses into a single coordinate space. This unified mapping facilitates intuitive visualization and efficient evaluation of candidate material combinations. The proposed framework simultaneously optimizes key aberration metrics while considering the thermomechanical compatibility between lens and housing materials, thereby achieving effective and practical material matching for diverse structural requirements. We validate the proposed method using a transmissive optical system operating over a wide temperature range from −30 °C to 120 °C. Simulation results demonstrate that the method maintains excellent imaging performance across the entire temperature range and supports flexible matching of lens–housing combinations. Compared with traditional athermal design workflows, our approach significantly reduces repetitive optimization and dependency on designer experience, offering improved design efficiency, robustness, and applicability for complex thermal environments.