As an important branch of microfluidic optics, microfluidic optics has become a key technology to promote the development of highly miniaturized and functional optics. Liquid lenses are a common form of microfluidic optical lenses, and as an important part of optical systems, they have obvious advantages over solid lenses, such as a reconfigurable geometry and tunable refractive index. At present, researchers have explored various techniques and tuning mechanisms to make liquid lenses, including fluid pressure lenses, electromagnetic wave lenses, electrowetting lenses and dielectrophoresis lenses. Unlike electrowetting driven liquid lenses, dielectrophoresis driven liquid lenses do not require conducting liquid and do not produce problems such as evaporation or microbubbles. To correct aberrations in practical applications, it is necessary to design a liquid lens with an aspherical surface, which has the advantages of a simple structure and easy realization because of the use of continuous electrodes compared with patterned electrodes.

Based on the dielectrophoresis effect, we design an aspherical combined liquid lens based on flat electrode. A certain dielectric constant difference exists between the two liquid materials filled with miscible pairs in the cavity. When the external voltage is applied, the droplet with high dielectric constant will move along the electric field direction and squeeze the droplet with low dielectric constant, and the curvature radius of the liquid-liquid interface will change. By adjusting the voltage applied to the two indium tin oxide (ITO) conductive glass flats in the middle, the curvature radius of the liquid-liquid interface can be changed to adjust the focal length. First, a model of an aspherical combined liquid lens based on a parallel flat electrode under different voltages is built by COMSOL, and the surface profile data of the aspherical interface are obtained. Then, the aspherical surface profile data and aspherical formula are fitted by MATLAB to obtain the corresponding aspherical coefficient. Finally, on this basis, the optical model of the aspherical combined liquid lens based on flat electrode is built by Zemax, and the focal length of the aspherical combined liquid lens under different voltages is obtained.

First, we compare the aspherical combined liquid lens based on the flat electrode with the aspherical single liquid lens, which has the same liquid material and droplet volume as the aspherical composite liquid lens. The results show that the aspherical combined liquid lens has a smaller focal length and stronger focusing ability than the aspherical single liquid lens and is more suitable for camera lenses requiring a large depth of field (Fig. 5). In order to further study the characteristics of aspherical combined liquid lens based on flat electrode, COMSOL software is used to simulate the change of the interface profile of aspherical combined liquid lens based on flat electrode under different parallelism. In the simulation process of the model, the lower flat is set to be placed horizontally. When the upper and lower flat are not parallel, that is, the upper flat and the horizontal direction have a certain tilt angle, the electric field distribution in the liquid lens model is analyzed (Fig. 6). The interface profile data obtained in COMSOL is derived, then MATLAB is applied to fit the profile, and the comparison and analysis of aspherical combined liquid lenses with different parallelism is carried out by using Zemax. It is found that the focal length of the aspherical combined liquid lens is little affected when the flat electrode has a small inclination (1° to 4°) (Fig. 7).

Based on the dielectrophoresis effect, an aspherical combined liquid lens based on flat electrode is designed in this study. The liquid lens consists of four ITO conductive flat glass plates, cavities, dielectric layers and hydrophobic layers parallel up and down. The focal length of the aspherical combined liquid lens under different voltages is calculated by using the relevant optical model, and the results show that the focal length of the aspherical combined liquid lens is smaller than that of the aspherical single liquid lens, and the imaging quality is better. The influence of the parallelism of the flat electrode on the focal length of the aspherical combined liquid lens is also discussed. The aspherical combined liquid lens is prepared experimentally, and its focal length and imaging resolution are measured. When the operating voltage increases from 0 to 280 V, the focal length varies from 28.7135 mm to 20.1943 mm, which is basically consistent with the simulation. The feasibility of the lens structure is verified by experiments. The imaging resolution is up to 49.8244 lp/mm. The designed aspherical combined liquid lens based on a flat electrode can provide a new scheme for the high-quality imaging of liquid lenses and their applications and can expand the application.