Radioactive isotope(RI) beams are used to investigate the characteristics of unstable nuclei. Fragment separators, which have large angular and energy acceptances, were required to obtain high RI beam intensity. Careful design is required due to the large high order aberrations induced by the large aperture magnets, which are used to collect rare isotopes obtained from a high energy primary heavy-ion beam hitting a target [1]. In our design study, a high energy C-12 primary beam was used to produce neutron rich medium mass heavy ions such as Li-9. Mirror symmetric optics provides smaller high order aberration and thus a design study of a mirror symmetric in-flight projectile fragment separator was performed to obtain large angular and energy acceptances. We investigated the optimal material and thickness of the target for the production of a Li-9 beam. Based on the simulation, a beryllium target was selected to give a large yield with a smaller energy spread of the secondary beam. We also investigated the optimal thickness of the aluminum energy degrader. The selections of the target material and thickness were investigated by using the code LISE++. After optimization of the material and the thickness of the target, we performed a design study of the optics of the in-flight separator for a high resolution with high acceptance. The designed optics of the in-flight separator consists of the four normal conducting quadrupole triplets, three sextupoles and two normal conducting dipoles. The horizontal and vertical angular acceptances of the designed separator are 40 mrad and 70 mrad, respectively. The separator has a mass resolution of 640 when the object size is taken to be 1 mm. The correction of the second order aberration in the designed optics was performed by three sextupole magnets. The path length of the designed separator is 20.183 m. The optics design and the high order aberrations were investigated by using the code ORBIT. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.