Cylinder Lens

A cylindrical lens or cylindrical lens is an optical lens that has a cylindrical or semi-cylindrical shape. Like a spherical lens, a cylindrical lens has one side that is curved and the other side that is flat.

Cylindrical lens  are mainly used to change the design requirements of the imaging size. For example, converting a spot into a line spot, or changing the height of the image without changing the width of the image. It can be used in linear detector lighting, barcode scanning, holographic lighting, light information processing, computer, laser emission. Cylindrical optical lens are also widely used in intense laser systems and synchrotron radiation beamlines. At the same time, the requirements for cylindrical mirror parts are getting higher and higher, especially in high-precision testing instruments and devices such as high-power laser resonators and long-distance interferometers.

The manufacture of cylindrical lens includes coarse grinding, fine grinding, polishing and centering edging.

Cylindrical lenses for various applications

Cylindrical lens is an aspherical lens, which can effectively reduce spherical aberration and chromatic aberration. It can be divided into plano-convex cylindrical lens, plano-concave cylindrical lens, double-convex cylindrical lens, double-concave cylindrical lens, meniscus cylindrical mirror, cylindrical cross-cylinder mirror and shaped cylindrical lens. It has one-dimensional amplification function.

Plano-convex Cylindrical Lenses

A plano-convex cylindrical lens, also known as an ortho-convex lens, gathers light rays on a single axis. It can be used to magnify an image in one direction, thus changing the aspect ratio. They will focus collimated light into a line, or create a line image from a point of light. These lenses are used in applications such as laser projection and illumination slits and line detector arrays. Two plano-convex cylindrical lenses can be used to collimate and circularize the light emitted from a laser diode.

To focus into a line, the plano-convex lenses should be oriented so that the light is incident on a curved surface. When collimating light, the lens is adjusted so that light from a line source is incident on a flat surface.

Plano-concave Cylindrical Lens

Plano-concave cylindrical lenses are called negative cylindrical lenses. They are similar to plano-concave lenses, but act on only one axis. They can extend light rays in this single axis and deflect parallel input rays by one line. Our Negative Cylindrical Lenses can be used for laser line generation, one-dimensional image compression, or anamorphic beam shaping. The curved surface of a negative cylindrical lens should face the light source when used to divert the beam, otherwise aberration may be an issue.

Aspherical Cylindrical Lenses

An aspheric cylindrical lens is the equivalent of a column lens to an aspherical lens to a standard spherical lens. Aspheric cylindrical lenses are designed to minimize aberration and provide the same one-dimensional focusing capabilities as conventional cylindrical lenses. Their shape is slightly different from a true cylindrical shape, and their applications are similar to those of other cylindrical lenses: distortion beam shaping, collimating the output of a laser diode, or focusing an evanescent beam onto a detector array.