Abstract
The present study covers an integrated simulation method to evaluate optical performance of an aspheric plastic lens by connecting a finite element (FE) analysis of injection molding with a ray tracing simulation. Traditional ray tracing methods have based on the assumption that the optical properties of a lens are homogeneous throughout the entire volume. This assumption is to a certain extent unrealistic for injection-molded plastic lenses because material properties vary at every point due to the injection molding effects. To take into account the effects of the inhomogeneous optical properties of the molded lens, a new.ay tracing scheme is proposed in conjunction with a FE analysis of the injection molding. A numerical scheme is developed to calculate ray paths on every element layer with more realistic information of the refractive indices which can be obtained through the FE analysis. This information is then used to calculate the ray paths based on the FE mesh of which nodal points have unique index values. The proposed tracing scheme is implemented on the tracing of an aspheric lens, and its validity is ascertained through experimental verification.