Modern Classical Optical System Design

Experienced optical designers and engineers often develop personal “bags of tricks” in the course of their careers. These tricks may, for example, involve special techniques to design lens systems, or perhaps they may be simple methods to align components. A designer’s bag of tricks saves time in typical modern fast-paced product development commercial projects. If you are an early-career designer, perhaps the hardest part about product development is knowing how to get started on applying the fundamentals to a real-world design within a tight schedule.

Modern Classical Optical System Design (MCOSD) is a book that, hopefully, can save you some needed time. MCOSD shares this author’s bag of tricks to help get you started in optical system design in a modern, fast-paced product development context. Design techniques, tips, and tricks for general optical systems are written with simple explanations and illustrations, but in-depth discussions (with mathematical rigor) are also provided for further study (you can procrastinate, but you ought to eventually know this material well because deep knowledge is the ultimate power of a designer). The term “modern classical” in the title of the book is meant to convey the message that well-established principles are applied to the design of optical systems by way of using specific tools and features of a modern optical design program (in this book, I have used the Ansys Zemax OpticStudio program). Also, some well-known concepts and formulas are re-interpreted (i.e., proven and derived differently, or expressed in a different form) and specific examples are provided to show how they can be applied to the design of optical systems.

Key Features

• Shares of special techniques, tips, and tricks in industrial practice not found in many textbooks
• Helps early-career optical designers and engineers get started with easy-to-understand and illustrative examples
• Quick reference for design methods using Zemax OpticStudio
• Relatable to modern optical product development