Hands-on training in Nonimaging Optics for SME's: the SMETHODS experience

A 5-day training in Nonimaging Optics for European SME’s employees was carried out in June 2012 in the framework of the FP7 funded Support Action "SMETHODS". The training combined theoretical introduction and hands-on practice. The experience was very positive, and the lessons learned will improve the next scheduled sessions. Introduction The FP7 funded Support Action "SMETHODS" [1] is an initiative of seven European academic institutions to strengthen Europe's optics and photonics industry, which has started on 1 September 2011. Participation in training sessions is free for participants, who are selected with priority will be given to employees of small and medium sized European enterprises (SMEs). The consortium in SMETHODS is formed by seven partners that are the most prominent academic institutions in optical design in their countries. Through fully integrated collaborative training sessions, the consortium provides professional assistance as well as hands-on training in a variety of design tasks in four domains: (1) imaging optics, (2) nonimaging optics, (3) wave optics, and (4) diffractive optics. For each of this domains domain, 5-day training sessions are scheduled to be hold in different locations throughout Europe, four times in two years, the teach four times in a 2.5 years period

Freeform optics for photovoltaic concentration

Freeform surfaces are the key of the state-of-the-art nonimaging optics to solve the challenges in concentration photovoltaics. Different families (FK, XR, FRXI) will be presented, based on the SMS 3D design method and Köhler homogenization

Double surface imaging designs with unconstrained object to image mapping under rotational symmetry

In this work, we present a novel imaging design formed by two optical surfaces with rotational symmetry. In these designs, both object and image shapes are given but mapping from object to image is obtained through the design process. In the examples considered, the image from a planar object surface is virtual and located at infinity and is seen from a known pupil, which can emulate a human eye. The differential equation method is used to provide single optical surface imaging designs by considering the local properties of the imaging surface and the wavefronts. In the first introductory part, both the rotational symmetrical and the freeform single surface imaging designs are presented using the differential equation method. In these designs, not only the mapping is obtained in the design process, but also the shape of the object is found. In the second part, the method is extended to two surface designs with rotational symmetry and the astigmatism of the image has been studied. By adding one more optical surface to the system, the shape of the rotational symmetrical object can be designed while controlling the tangential rays and sagittal rays simultaneously. As a result, designs without astigmatism (at the small pupil limit) on a planar object surface have been obtained. © (2014) COPYRIGHT Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE). Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only

The Monge-Ampére equation method in freeform optics design

The Monge-Ampére equation method could be the most advanced point source algorithm of freeform optics design. This paper introduces this method, and outlines two key issues that should be tackles to improve this method

TIR RXI collimator

A metal-less RXI collimator has been designed using the Simultaneous multiple surface method (SMS). Unlike conventional RXI collimators, whose back surface and parts of the front surface have to be metalized, this collimator is completely metal-free, made only of plastic (PMMA). The collimator’s back surface is designed as a grooved surface providing two TIR reflections for all rays impinging on it. One advantage of the design is the lower manufacturing cost, since there is no need for the expensive process of metalization. More importantly, unlike conventional RXI collimators, this design performs good colour mixing, as well as being very insensitive to the source non-uniformities. The experimental measurements of the first prototype show good agreement with the simulated design

Single freeform surface imaging design with unconstrained object to image mapping

An imaging design approach which is free of third-order astigmatism for one freeform optical surface and the image is presented in this paper. A set of differential equations is derived from generalized ray tracing. The solution of the above derived equations provides the anastigmatic freeform optical surface, the image surface and the object to image mapping. The obtained design can be used as a good starting point for optimization. As an example, a reflective freeform surface is designed for a single reflective Head Mounted Display (HMD). This example has a 3 mm pupil, 15mm eye clearance, 24-degree diagonal full field of view, and the final design yields an average MTF of 62.6% across 17 field points

Freeform Optical Surfaces: Report from OSA's First Incubator Meeting

Just as business incubator programs are designed to support the development of fledgling companies, OSA?s new incubator meeting series is structured to encourage the growth of exciting new areas within optics. The first one was devoted to the topic of freeform optics-a field that is actively evolving due to recent technological advances

Novel free-form optical surface design with spiral symmetry

Manufacturing technologies as injection molding or embossing specify their production limits for minimum radii of the vertices or draft angle for demolding, for instance. These restrictions may limit the system optical efficiency or affect the generation of undesired artifacts on the illumination pattern when dealing with optical design. A novel manufacturing concept is presented here, in which the optical surfaces are not obtained from the usual revolution symmetry with respect to a central axis (z axis), but they are calculated as free-form surfaces describing a spiral trajectory around z axis. The main advantage of this new concept lies in the manufacturing process: a molded piece can be easily separated from its mold just by applying a combination of rotational movement around axis z and linear movement along axis z, even for negative draft angles. The general designing procedure will be described in detai

Analytical solution of an afocal two freeform mirror design problem

We investigate a new afocal two freeform mirror design problem in first order optics. The resulting first-order partial differential equations for the freeform two mirror system have an analytic solution with the sole condition that the x-y and x'-y' axes are parallel. Two selected solutions are presented. One of them is emiaplanatic (fulfilling the aplanatic condition only for the x-coordinates), while the other is, to our knowledge, the firstexample of an aplanatic two-mirror system without rotational symmetry

Determination of individual concentrator tolerances from full-array I-V curve measurements

When dealing with CPV manufacturing process, tolerances are critical in order to obtain a low cost massproduction system. Usually the efficiency attained by a whole module array is smaller than the average efficiency of every single module. This downside is due to the well-known mismatch losses introduced by the cell series connection. For this reason, we present a novel mathematical method to calculate photocurrent versus pointing angle curves for the single-cell modules, with the only information of photocurrent versus pointing angle measurements for the whole module array. In this way we can estimate the mismatch losses for a given array just by analyzing its full-array I-V curve. Thus, the great breakthrough about this method lies in no single-cell module measurement is needed. The application of this method allows the measurement of the real tolerances of any CPV system