In-volume heating using high-power laser diodes

High-power lasers are useful instruments suitable for applications in various fields; the most common industrial applications include cutting and welding. We propose a new application of high-power laser diodes as in-bulk heating source for food industry. Current heating processes use surface heating with different approaches to make the heat distribution more uniform and the process more efficient. High-power lasers can in theory provide in-bulk heating which can sufficiently increase the uniformity of heat distribution thus making the process more efficient. We chose two media (vegetable fat and glucose) for feasibility experiments. First, we checked if the media have necessary absorption coefficients on the wavelengths of commercially available laser diodes (940-980 nm). This was done using spectrophotometer at 700-1100 nm which provided the dependences of transmission from the wavelength. The results indicate that vegetable fat has noticeable transmission dip around 925 nm and glucose has sufficient dip at 990 nm. Then, after the feasibility check, we did numerical simulation of the heat distribution in bulk using finite elements method. Based on the results, optimal laser wavelength and illuminator configuration were selected. Finally, we carried out several pilot experiments with high-power diodes heating the chosen media.Delft Center for Systems and ControlMechanical, Maritime and Materials Engineerin

Scatterers shape effect on speckle patterns

Laser speckle analysis is a very powerful method with various existing applications, including biomedical diagnostics. The majority of the speckle applications are based on analysis of dependence of scattered light intensity distribution from sizes of the scattereres. We propose a numerical model of speckle formation in reflected light in one-dimension which shows that properties of the scattered light are strongly dependent on the form of the scatterers. In particular, the dependence of number of speckles from the size of the scatterers was investigated for the light reflected from the surface with varying roughness; the single roughness on the surface was assumed to have the form of one-dimensional ‘pyramid’ with the sides having either linear or parabolic descent from the top of the ‘pyramid’ to the bottom. It was found that for the linear roughness, number of speckles decreased with increase of the roughness size, whereas for the parabolic roughness the number of speckles increased. Results of numerical simulation were compared with experiment investigations of roughness samples (0.5-2.5 ?m) made of glass and copper. Due to different production processes, the glass samples are likely to have the parabolic roughness and copper samples are likely to have the linear roughness. Experiments show that the dependences of number of speckles also have different slopes, the same as in numerical simulation. These findings can lead to new analytical methods capable of determining not only the size distribution of roughness (or scatterers) but also the shape.Delft Center for Systems and ControlMechanical, Maritime and Materials Engineerin

Fast calculation of best focus position

New computational technique based on linear-scale differential analysis (LSDA) of digital image is proposed to find the best focus position in digital microscopy by means of defocus estimation in two near-focal positions only. The method is based on the calculation of local gradients of the image on different scales using its convolution with a number of differential filters of linearly varying sizes, consequent removal of noisy pixels out of consideration, and selection of pixels at the edges of objects. It is shown that the mean values of the selected gradients decrease while the scale increases thus the rate of change of these mean values of gradients unambiguously determines the magnitude of digital image defocus as a function of scale. Using this method the value and sign of defocus can be found if the result of LSDA of captured images is compared with pre-defined look-up table. The robustness of the proposed method to spatial noise is achieved by ignoring pixels that are corrupted by spatial noise within the areas of the image outside the edges of objects. Most computational operations of the method are based on integer arithmetic that simplifies its practical implementation and significantly improves the performance. The latter aspect is particularly important for practical use in real-time imaging systems.Delft Center for Systems and ControlMechanical, Maritime and Materials Engineerin

Coupling of a CMOS Optical Sensor to a Micromachined Deformable Mirror with an Adaline Neural Method

We report on the preliminary results of an Adaline neural method for the coupling of a custom CMOS wavefront sensor to a micromachined adaptive mirror. The algorithm does not rely on a fixed basis matrix -as opposed to traditional methods-, offers excellent immunity to round-off errors and admits real-time input adaptability to speed up computations.MicroelectronicsElectrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Scienc

Wavefront coding with adaptive optics

We have implemented an extended depth of field optical system by wavefront coding with a micromachined membrane deformable mirror. This approach provides a versatile extension to standard wavefront coding based on fixed phase mask. First experimental results validate the feasibility of the use of adaptive optics for variable depth wavefront coding in imaging optical systems. © (2015) COPYRIGHT Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE). Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.Delft Center for Systems and ControlMechanical, Maritime and Materials Engineerin

Modal liquid crystal wavefront corrector

Results are presented of the properties of a liquid crystal wavefront corrector for adaptive optics. The device is controlled using modal addressing in which case the device behaves more like a continuous facesheet deformable mirror than a segmented one. Furthermore, the width and shape of the influence functions are electrically controllable. We describe the construction of the device, the optical properties, and we show experimental results of low order aberration generation