A COMPUTATIONAL INVESTIGATION OF LENS MATERIALS FOR PASSIVE INFRARED OPTICAL SYSTEM

A computational investigation has been adopted for designing an optical system for infrared homing head, operated in the region (3-5) μm. The design stage depends originally, on a standard optical system for IR homing head. These improvements include choosing the most suitable materials and features for each optical element in the developed design. An improvement stage was then followed for the correcting the radius of curvature of the correcting lens, which has process have been carried out using Zemax software to determining the most favorable optical properties i.e. spherical aberration, size of spot, and size and shape of the system. The results show that the best optical system was obtained when the dome and correcting lens are made of Sapphire material