Check out the article by Photon Engineering President Richard Pfisterer on page 16 of the October 2011 issue of Optics and Photonics News: “Approximated Scatter Models for Stray Light Analysis”. In this article, Rich discusses how to appropriately use and interpret the parameters of the ABg scatter model. A PDF version of the article is available using the link below.
FRED v10.100 is officially released! A few of the exciting new features added in this release are described below:
Detector Entities
Detector entities are a new type of analysis surface which are capable of performing analyses dynamically during the raytrace and can be created as planes, spheres, cylinders and cones. Detector entities can be instructed to collect rays either during the trace (as rays intersect them), immediately after the trace, or upon request, giving the user the ability to perform analyses in multiple optical spaces with a single raytrace. This implementation only supports incoherent irradiance, illuminance and color image analyses.
Lens Modules
Four new “Lens Module” surface types simulate the effects of an ideal spherical surface, finite conjugate lens, infinite conjugate lens or afocal lens.
Simplified Laser Diode Beam
An alternate simplified source for modeling astigmatic gaussian laser beams has been added which uses a new algorithm for source creation and improves accuracy over a broader range of divergence angles.
Existing customers should check their email for download instructions.
FRED v10.70 is officially released! This version is a minor release with focus on generic improvements to FRED’s raytracing speed. A few of the exciting new features added in this release are described below:
General Raytrace Speed Improvement
Many routines involved in FRED’s raytrace have been addressed to provide a significant improvement in general raytrace speed. These changes are transparent to the user and can be expected to result in 10 – 50% faster raytracing, depending on the model. In particular, FRED’s gluing algorithm has been significantly improved.
User Interface Dialogs
Most of FRED’s dialogs now retain knowledge of their last known size and position in the current session. Dialogs opened multiple times will be located and sized according to their last configuration.
Curve Geometries
The Traceable option on a Curve geometry type now controls whether a curve is drawn to the 3D view. If the Draw flag is set on the visualization tab of the curve’s dialog, the curve’s rendering can be toggled by making the curve (or the curve’s parent node) traceable or untraceable.
CAD Export
The CAD exporter now supports export of partial models. The “Export Selected Entities” option will export only those entities (and their children) currently selected on the object tree.
Scripting Commands
Several new script commands have been added relating to angle definitions (PI, DegToRad and RadToDeg), eliminating the need to define these as custom variables in scripts. Users should check any old scripts for custom definitions of these variables to avoid potential compiler errors.
Photon Engineering will be participating in the International Light Simulation Symposium (ILiSiS) being held in Nuremberg, Germany on March 7-8, 2012. We would like to encourage members of the FRED community, as well as the larger community of optical software users, to join us in supporting this new forum on the modeling of optical systems and light phenomenon.
Abstracts are being accepted for consideration until: June 15th, 2011
Official website: www.ilisis.com
Please read below for a description of the symposium:
“Throughout the past few years Light Simulation has been a fast growing method to accelerate the development processes of components for the lighting industry. Most companies that have used Light Simulation in the development process are not only working with one Light Simulation product, but with several different ones. Independent from the used Simulation Software, fundamental questions are virtually the same: how to model realistically the world?
International Light Simulation Symposium (ILISIS) has the intention to bring together the Light Simulation software developers and their users. It is an opportunity for a scientific exchange about experiences in modeling optical behavior.”
Abstracts for the symposium on the following topics are currently being accepted:
Photon Engineering would like to thank all the attendees and registrants of the May 10th Stray Light Webinar sessions, we hope it was informative A recording of the webinar is provided below as well as the slides from the presentation.
The next Stray Light Short Courses being offered in the U.S. and Europe are on June 6 – 8 (Tucson, AZ) and October 12 – 14 (Munich, Germany).
Stray Light Short Course Webinar – May 10th, 2011 from Ryan Irvin on Vimeo.
| Stray light control is an important consideration in virtually every sensor system that is constructed. However the task of doing a stray light analysis is daunting: How do you describe scatter from paints, optical surfaces, and particulates? What are reasonable assumptions? What are commonly used metrics for assessing stray light? Are there “tricks of the trade”? (Yes!) How do field stops and Lyot stops work? How can you compute the effects of diffraction from apertures? How do you design baffles and vanes? What are good practices for designing for minimum stray light? How do you use software to calculate stray light?
With almost 30 years of stray light analysis and software experience, Richard Pfisterer, president of Photon Engineering, LLC, will discuss these and other related topics in our webinars on Tuesday, May 10th. There will be two sessions lasting approximately ½ hour each. Please use the links below to register for the session which best fits your schedule (times provided are for Arizona, GMT-07:00).
Click here to register for the 7:00 AM session
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After registering you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the Webinar. |
FRED v10.41 is officially released today! A few of the exciting new features added in this release are described below:
Element Composites
The Element Composite construct allows for the creation of complex solid geometries by application of the union, intersection and difference boolean operations to combine Element Primitives and/or element composites. Once specified, the composite is maintained as a dynamic solid which will update as its component elements are modified. Element Composites are exportable to CAD using STEP or IGES formats.
Coil Surface
The coil surface type is defined as a circular cross section swept along a helical curve, where the helical axis of symmetry is along Z. There are four parameters which completely specify the coil surface; the helix radius (R), the circle radius (r), the coil pitch and the number of coil turns. Additionally, an element primitive coil has been implemented to support this surface type.
Grating Phase
The default grating settings add phase continuously between line pairs but modulo 2*PI across the entire grating, resetting the phase when crossing into a new line pair. For some applications, the desired behavior is that phase is added continuously across the entire grating. The options “Add modulo 2*PI phase per grating line” and “Add full 2*PI phase per grating line” allow the user to toggle between these two modes of operation. The additional specification “Grating line offset (number of grating lines)” allows the user to specify the zero phase point in the grating with respect to the surface origin when operating in the continuous phase mode.
Analysis Results Nodes (ARNs)
The Analysis Results folder on the object tree stores Analysis Results Nodes created during the current document session. Right mouse clicking on the folder allows ARN creation, deletion, and display in both the visualization view and the chart view.
Image Artifact Diagnostic Tool
If a raytrace has been performed using the Advanced Raytrace option with ray paths enabled, contributing raypath information for a particular region of interest can be reported directly from the chart view for an incoherent spatial analysis. This feature can be executed by holding down the ALT keyboard button while using the mouse to select a region of the main chart view (turn off “perspective view” using the right mouse button menu option).
Stray Light Report / Raypaths Output
The “Output Stray Light Report” and “Output Path Report” in the Stray Light Report and Raytrace Paths dialog prints to the output window a copy of the receiver settings, normalization settings, list settings, report headers, path information for each selected row of the stray light paths report, and total ray count, power % and power for all selected rows. Contiguous rows in the report can be selected by holding the “Shift” keyboard button while non contiguous rows can be selected by holding the “Ctrl” keyboard button. This option is very useful for copying paths of interest to the FRED output window for transfer to another program for analysis or documentation.
Ray Path Node Number(s)
The Ray Path Node Number(s) tool allows an object to report a node ID other than itself for ray path purposes, simplifying and reducing the reported ray paths following an advanced raytrace. This feature can be particularly useful when working with models imported from CAD, which often define a single structure as a composite of smaller surfaces. In such cases the composite surfaces can be set to report a single node ID in the ray paths list, greatly simplifying path based analyses.
A new technical support video has been posted to the knowledge base. This video demonstrates a new feature in v10.31 or later which makes modeling fluorescence phenomena much simpler. The FRED file created during the video is also posted with the video.
A new technical support video has been posted to the knowledge base. This video discusses how to turn a lens’ plane bevels into tilted bevels and how to construct a composite lens element whose edges have different aperture sizes.
A new technical support video has been posted to the knowledge base. This video discusses how to assign an importance sample specification to multiple surfaces at once using FRED’s scripting language.
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