• abbe number
• aberrations
• accommodation
• double tunable optical system
• human eye
• ray tracing
• refractive index
• sylgard 184
• tunable polymer lens

This thesis is the first step towards the development of an enhanced optical system inspired to the pre-retinal structure eyes. This device will have to integrate two tunable polymer lenses obtained by combining an emerging class of polymer-based ‘artificial muscle’ materials and technology, with a bio-inspired design of the lens architecture ,a bio-inspired working principle of the lens tunability and the tunability of the curvature of the photo-detecting unit.
The purpose of this thesis is the development of a software tool to model, to design, to evaluate and to simulate the optical performance of a device inspired to the architecture of the eye and which integrates two or more tunable polymer lens. This tool is tested into the modeling of a bio-inspired optical system which mimics the structure(cornea and crystalline lens) and the optical proprieties (visual acuity, dimension, accommodation process, optical power distribution between the lenses) of the human eye. Moreover, the modeled system is provided with a further degree of freedom given by a tunable polymeric ‘cornea’. The designed system is evaluated in terms of paraxial condition and primary aberration, also during the ‘accommodation process’ of the lenses.
To optimize the modeling and the design, the fluid (pre-polymer SILGARD 184®) used as refractive medium in the polymer lenses, is characterized in terms of refractive index (accuracy ± 5 〖10〗^(-4)) as function of wavelength (400-700 nm) and temperature (20,30,40 °C) .The Abbe number of the fluid is calculated.