Design and Analysis of Combinatorially Assembled Optical Systems

Producing high quality optical systems at reasonable cost is a challenge andsolutions enabling cost-efficient production in small to medium quantities needto be developed in order for Germany to stay competitive on the global market.Both, performance and cost are largely influenced by manufacturing andassembly tolerances and frequently compensation such as alignment is requiredto achieve the demanded performance.This dissertation systematically develops combinatorial assembly as acompensation strategy which does not require iterations and as such is suitablefor automated production of small series. A pool of components andsubassemblies, necessary for the assembly of a series of systems, ischaracterized prior to the assembly and measurement results are stored in adatabase. Then, optimal component combinations are found during a modelbasedselection process.The application of combinatorial assembly to optical systems requires a delicatechoice of parameters for characterization, modules and tolerances beforecomponents are manufactured. Predicting the as-built performance ofcombinatorially assembled systems with high accuracy is therefore necessaryand a dedicated tolerance analysis concept based on Monte Carlo analyses isproposed. The concept is universally applicable to problems that can bemodelled with ray-tracing and is implemented using a combination of raytracingsoftware, logic calculator and database. This makes it possible toaccurately analyze the impact of tolerances, production volume and additionaluncertainties on the performance of combinatorially assembled optical systems.For optimal compensation, tolerance distributions should match each other in aspecific way and it is illustrated that this can be difficult to realize for some lensdesigns due to manufacturing limits. In order to reduce this restriction, designstrategies increasing combinatorial compensation are derived. Adapting theoptical design from the outset to suit combinator