 |
ZEMAX | ||||||
|
ZEMAX
supports a huge range different types of surfaces. Surfaces may
be freely combined to model virtually any optical system. All
surfaces have free parameters which describe the properties of
the surface. All parameters may be optimised.
Surfaces are chosen from a simple drop-down list. In addition to a comprehensive range of surfaces, ZEMAX has a comprehensive range of apertures. First, there is a system aperture which defines the size of the beam traveling through the optics on axis. This aperture may be specified by the entrance pupil diameter, infinite or finite conjugate F/#, numerical aperture, cone angle, or by the system stop size.
ZEMAX can trace
rays which are launched either at the paraxial pupil, or at
the real, aberrated pupil. This feature is absolutely essential
in wide angle and fast optical systems.
The User Aperture
and User Obscuration allow you to define your own, arbitrarily-shaped
apertures and obscurations. Arbitrary user defined apertures
and both phase and amplitude transmission masks may be defined
and placed anywhere in the optical system. Arbitrary transmission
may be a function of any parameter, such as position, angle,
or wavelength. ZEMAX also gives you several ways to model arbitrary shaped surfaces. A Grid surface allows you to define a surface as as list of (x,y,z) coordinates. This is extremely useful. For example, imagine you need to design a large mirror, and have modelled it in a Finite Element Analysis (FEA) package to study how much is deforms under its own weight. Using the Grid surface, you can easily import the data from the FEA package, and model the optical properties of the deformed mirror. If you need to use a surface type that ZEMAX does not support, then you can write your own surface as an external program and simply link it to ZEMAX. Sequential Surface TypesZEMAX supports sequential ray-tracing through surfaces bounding refractive, reflective, diffractive or gradient index media. Sequential surface types are summarised in the following list.
User-Defined SurfacesFor those cases where a specialized surface is required, ZEMAX supports a user defined surface. The user defined surface is compiled code in a Windows DLL.
For customers that do not have the desire or ability to program specialized surface types, Optima Research offers this service at a reasonable cost. The vast majority of optics applications do not require custom surface types. The following user defined surfaces, as well as many others, are included with ZEMAX as both examples and as ready to use compiled surfaces:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
