OPTOPRIM and ORA Announce Results of the 2004 Optical Design Challenge

October 2004 - OPTOPRIM and ORA have announced the winners of OPTOPRIM's annual Optical Design Challenge, in which a prize of €4,000 Euro is granted to a French student project that utilizes ORA's CODE V or LightTools software to perform research in some area of optical design. OPTOPRIM, which markets and supports CODE V and LightTools in France, Belgium, Spain, and Switzerland, sponsors this annual award program. ORA optical engineers evaluate each entry. The winning entry was announced at the OPTO show in Paris.

The winning paper, "Design of a New Generation of Telescopes," is by Olivier Jeannin and Christophe Sailliot, who are third-year students of the Institut d'Optique. This project is a design study of a very large ground-based telescope based on specifications published by the European Southern Observatory (ESO) for the proposed OWL (OverWhelmingly Large) telescope. This concept design features a segmented primary mirror of 100 meter aperture with adaptive optics to correct for atmospheric turbulence.

The students created a detailed model of this telescope in CODE V, making use of some of the most advanced and recent technical features of the software. They used local and global optimization, macro programming, interferogram (INT) files to model the segments of the primary mirror, and a user- defined surface (written in C) to model the adaptive optics. They also made extensive use of MATLAB^®, first to create the INT file for randomly perturbed primary mirror segments, and then to create another INT file to model atmospheric turbulence. Later they made use of CODE V's COM interface to transfer diffraction analysis data into MATLAB in order to create simulated star-field pictures showing the effects of turbulence and adaptive corrections. In addition to the report, they also provided all the files associated with their work, allowing it to be verified.

The combination of an interesting topic, good optical approach, and appropriate application of the advanced features of CODE V resulted in an excellent paper, well deserving of the prize for this year's challenge.

For more information, please visit OPTOPRIM's Web site, www.optoprim.com, or contact them directly by email: info@optoprim.com.

 

 

 

 

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