Lorentz Force Actuated Tunable-Focus Liquid Lens.

Tunable-focus liquid lenses provide focal length tuning for optical systems, e.g., cameras, where physical movement of rigid lenses are not an option or not preferable.

Flexible Electrowetting-on-Dielectric Microlens Array Sheet.

We have fabricated a fully-flexible, focus-tunable microlens array on a sheet and demonstrated its imaging capabilities. Each liquid lens of the array is individually tunable via electrowetting on dielectric (EWOD) actuation and is situated on a polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) substrate, which allows the lens array to operate as a reconfigurable optical system. In particular, we observed a significant increase in the field of view (FOV) of the system to 40.

Fabrication and Actuation of an Electrowetting Droplet Array on a Flexible Substrate.

Electrowetting-on-dielectric (EWOD) is a fast, well-established actuation method for a variety of applications, from microfluidics to electrowetting displays to electrowetting lenses. We therefore seek to develop a robust, scalable fabrication method for the realization of EWOD on a flexible polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) substrate in order to increase the range of possible applications. We fabricated a 5 × 5 array of individually controlled electrowetting cells to manipulate silicone oil droplets via EWOD.