Design and Analysis of Combinatorially Assembled Optical Systems

Producing high quality optical systems at reasonable cost is a challenge and solutions enabling cost-efficient production in small to medium quantities need to be developed in order for Germany to stay competitive on the global market. Both, performance and cost are largely influenced by manufacturing and assembly tolerances and frequently compensation such as alignment is required to achieve the demanded performance. This dissertation systematically develops combinatorial assembly as a compensation strategy which does not require iterations and as such is suitable for automated production of small series. A pool of components and subassemblies, necessary for the assembly of a series of systems, is characterized prior to the assembly and measurement results are stored in a database. Then, optimal component combinations are found during a modelbased selection process. The application of combinatorial assembly to optical systems requires a delicate choice of parameters for characterization, modules and tolerances before components are manufactured. Predicting the as-built performance of combinatorially assembled systems with high accuracy is therefore necessary and a dedicated tolerance analysis concept based on Monte Carlo analyses is proposed. The concept is universally applicable to problems that can be modelled with ray-tracing and is implemented using a combination of raytracing software, logic calculator and database. This makes it possible to accurately analyze the impact of tolerances, production volume and additional uncertainties on the performance of combinatorially assembled optical systems. For optimal compensation, tolerance distributions should match each other in a specific way and it is illustrated that this can be difficult to realize for some lens designs due to manufacturing limits. In order to reduce this restriction, design strategies increasing combinatorial compensation are derived. Adapting the optical design from the outset to suit combinator