Automatisierte Auslegung optischer Systeme aus Kataloglinsen

• Automated design of optical systems made of stock lenses

König, Hans-Georg Manfred; Loosen, Peter (Thesis advisor); Schmitt, Robert H. (Thesis advisor)

Aachen : RWTH Aachen University (2021, 2022)
Dissertation / PhD Thesis

Dissertation, Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule Aachen, 2021

Abstract

As everyday life and various industries are increasingly relying on applications based on optical principles, the demand for individual optical systems rises. To meet this demand, this dissertation focuses on developing a method for non-expert users to be able to design individual optical systems based on stock lenses using personal computers. To do so, conventional lens design processes are analyzed to identify those process steps which cannot be performed by non-experts. The approach of the newly developed method is to identify the most suitable lens combination from the entity of all possible combinations of stock lenses. For this purpose, several filters are developed, applied subsequently and in ascending order with respect to their computational effort. Thereby, the number of lens combinations decreases after each use of a filter. In order to be able to use the newly developed method on personal computers, a specific version is developed. Importantly, the mixed continuous-discrete optimization problem of designing optical systems from catalog lenses is therefore reduced to a discrete optimization problem by analytically describing the distances in a three-lens system. Furthermore, a new method for the efficient solution of discrete optimization problems, the pseudo-complete enumeration, is developed. In a last step, a study is carried out, comparing different methods for robustness analysis. Here, sensitivity analysis is identified as an efficient replacement for the computationally expensive Monte Carlo analysis often used in commercial development environments. The described version of the developed method is subsequently transferred to a development environment. This development environment features a graphical user interface, enabling the user to enter the requirements and visualize the designed optical systems in a user-friendly fashion. To verify the new method and the development environment, various optical systems for laser technology are designed and the results are compared with a commercial computer program for designing optical systems. It can be shown that the optical systems designed with the development environment meet the requirements and the calculations of the optical path difference agree to within one-thousandth wavelength accuracy in the test cases studied.