Boundary ray analysis of radiometric optical systems
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- Radiometric optical systems are designed to control the flow of radiant energy. The objective may be to collect energy from a source, transmit energy from the source to a point of use, or concentrate energy onto a receiver. These systems differ substantially from imaging systems both in application and design. Some radiometric applications must consider the fine, information-bearing structures of the light, but the objective is to destroy this structure, not carefully preserve it! The objective of this thesis is to provide insight and design methodology that result when the fine scale structure of the illumination is ignored. When fine scale brightness differences in the illumination are avoided or ignored, the remaining feature of the illumination is the boundary between rays that carry radiant energy and neighboring rays that don't. The rays that fall on this boundary between light and dark are the boundary rays. These rays have particular significance. By knowing the location of the boundary, the location of all the illumination is known. Furthermore, it is shown that the boundary is conserved during propagation through a continuous optical system. The illumination at the output may be determined by tracing just these rays from the input. This result is rigorously proven and called "the boundary mapping theorem for continuous optical systems". Conservation of boundary rays is a mixed blessing. It specifies both a simplification, only the boundary rays are important, but also a constraint, the boundary rays cannot be changed. Discontinuous optical systems have isolated discontinuities where the boundary rays of the illumination do change. Furthermore, discontinuous optical systems have great radiometric performance! A careful examination of discontinuities permits extension of the boundary mapping theorem to optical systems with discontinuities. The discontinuity at the edge of a reflector and the discontinuity at the critical angle are analyzed in detail. The changes that occur in the boundary, either addition of new boundary rays or deletion of old boundary rays, are specified for these discontinuities. If only a few rays determine radiometric behavior, then control of these rays controls the radiometric behavior. In two-dimensional light pipes, sufficient degrees of freedom exist to fully control the important rays. The resulting designs are optimal: all the rays that the system is designed to accept are transmitted to the output, and only those rays are transmitted to the output. Several light pipes are designed and analyzed in this thesis to exemplify this behavior.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic; electronic resource; remote |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Copyright date | 2011 |
| Publication date | 2010, c2011; 2010 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Associated with | Daiber, Andrew John |
|---|---|
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Electrical Engineering |
| Primary advisor | Gibbons, James F |
| Primary advisor | Hesselink, Lambertus |
| Thesis advisor | Gibbons, James F |
| Thesis advisor | Hesselink, Lambertus |
| Thesis advisor | Macovski, Albert, 1929- |
| Advisor | Macovski, Albert, 1929- |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Andrew John Daiber. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Electrical Engineering. |
| Thesis | Thesis (Ph.D.)--Stanford University, 2011. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2011 by Andrew John Daiber
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
Also listed in
Loading usage metrics...