Kingslake Medal

Wei Zhang of the National University of Singapore and Hans Zappe and Andreas Seifert of the University of Freiburg (Germany) have been selected as the 2013 winners of the Rudolf Kingslake Medal and Prize for their paper on “Polyacrylate membranes for tunable liquid-filled microlenses.”

SPIE presents the Kingslake Medal annually for the most noteworthy original paper in Optical Engineering and includes a $2,000 honorarium.

The winning paper was published in the April 2013 issue of Optical Engineering and details a new, simplified process for fabrication of tunable liquid-filled lenses using polyacrylate as a new membrane material. The new process provides a useful approach for achieving stable and predictable focal properties, researchers said.

Potential applications for the microlenses are in artificial muscles, solid-state linear actuators for scientific or industrial applications, or other applications in which large deformations are needed.

Tomasz Tkaczyk, chair of the Kingslake Award committee, said committee members selected the paper because it is a comprehensive study of the properties of the proposed material.

It also has a discussion of the long-term dependencies of mechanical and chemical properties on system performance, which together create a foundation to develop a new class of tunable components.

“The authors’ findings can be used by other designers of active optical systems to manufacture robust and dependable active optical devices,” Tkaczyk said.

Zappe is professor of micro-optics and associate dean of engineering in the Department of Microsystems Engineering at University of Freiburg.	Seifert received his PhD in physics from Freiburg and is currently group leader for microsystems engineering there.	Zhang, a postdoctoral fellow at the National University of Singapore, was a member of Zappe’s group while completing her PhD in Freiburg.

Their Optical Engineering paper is available in the SPIE Digital Library.

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