One of the difficulties in designing infrared optical systems is the comparative lack of glasses from which to design lenses. In visible optical systems, the designer has a palette of hundreds of glass options with varying dispersions and mechanical properties. In contrast, the designer of infrared optical systems has perhaps a dozen materials options from which to choose.
Instead, what if the infrared transparent materials were designed specifically for various applications? Using a material with a targeted index dispersion profile, the designer can complete a system using fewer lens surfaces and in many cases with increased functionality such as athermalization.
Next comes the question of how to obtain such a material. One approach is somewhat scattershot: to melt series of glasses, measure each of their properties, and settle on one composition for scale-up to production volumes. This approach is both time- and resource-consuming, as the measurements for many properties require specialized equipment and sample preparation.
In contrast to this scattershot method, the principle of intelligent material design allows glass scientists to design glasses with intentionally chosen mechanical and optical properties, and greatly reduces the number of test melts required to obtain a final production solution. Intelligent material design consists of leveraging the existing literature data to make informed decisions about which glass compositions are likely to exhibit the desired properties. By describing the variation of the properties over the glass family with mathematical functions, the material design problem is reduced to the simultaneous solution of a set of equations.