Advanced Geometry Modeling in RayJack ONE®

In previous releases of RayJack ONE®, we have already implemented all kinds of surfaces typically needed for optical simulations. If there is still one missing, users can supply their own surface definitions through #Python functions. 

In order to facilitate your work in imaging and illumination optics, RayJack ONE®’s latest 3.2.5 release offers the following frequently requested surface types:

·      Zernike surfaces, which can be used “stand-alone” or as deformations of a base surface such as an asphere; various conventions for entering Zernike coefficients are supported
·      Toroidal surfaces with an aspheric profile
·      Surfaces based on the various types of Forbes polynomials
·      User defined NURBS surfaces to allow for true freeform optics

The animation shows ray tracing through a NURBS surface, varying the weight of one of the control points.

Finding Unlikely Ray Paths in RayJack ONE®
 
Consider a mirror cabinet consisting of three curved mirrors, illuminated by a point source. Only a small fraction of light will finally hit the small detector behind the last mirror.
This simple optical system mimics a typical situation in stray light analysis, where light paths are often “unlikely” meaning that only a very few rays follow it. Normally this causes large statistical errors in the results or excessively long simulation times. But there is a smarter solution …
 
RayJack ONE®’s path finder tool allows you to find as many rays for a given path as you want. It iteratively searches for rays connecting a sequence of objects until the rays finally hit the detector. And differential ray tracing ensures noise-free results.
 
The picture shows a ray trace through the system along with the irradiance distribution and optical path length map on the detector.

A look back at past events etc. can be found in our ARCHIVE