Building Electro-Optical Systems (eBook)

Making It All Work

Philip C. D. Hobbs (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2022 | 3. Auflage
832 Seiten
Wiley (Verlag)
978-1-119-43906-6 (ISBN)

Infos

Building Electro-Optical Systems

In the newly revised third edition of Building Electro-Optical Systems: Making It All Work, renowned Dr. Philip C. D. Hobbs delivers a birds-eye view of all the topics you'll need to understand for successful optical instrument design and construction. The author draws on his own work as an applied physicist and consultant with over a decade of experience in designing and constructing electro-optical systems from beginning to end.

The book's topics are chosen to allow readers in a variety of disciplines and fields to quickly and confidently decide whether a given device or technique is appropriate for their needs. Using accessible prose and intuitive organization, Building Electro-Optical Systems remains one of the most practical and solution-oriented resources available to graduate students and professionals.

The newest edition includes comprehensive revisions that reflect progress in the field of electro-optical instrument design and construction since the second edition was published. It also offers approximately 350 illustrations for visually oriented learners. Readers will also enjoy:

• A thorough introduction to basic optical calculations, including wave propagation, detection, coherent detection, and interferometers
• Practical discussions of sources and illuminators, including radiometry, continuum sources, incoherent line sources, lasers, laser noise, and diode laser coherence control
• Explorations of optical detection, including photodetection in semiconductors and signal-to-noise ratios
• Full treatments of lenses, prisms, and mirrors, as well as coatings, filters, and surface finishes, and polarization

Perfect for graduate students in physics, electrical engineering, optics, and optical engineering, Building Electro-Optical Systems is also an ideal resource for professional designers working in optics, electro-optics, analog electronics, and photonics.

Philip C.D. Hobbs, PhD, is the Principal of ElectroOptical Innovations, a consultancy in Briarcliff Manor, New York.

Inhalt

Preface xxxix

Acknowledgments xliii

1 Basic Optical Calculations 1

2 Sources And Illuminators 41

3 Optical Detection 81

4 Lenses, Prisms, and Mirrors 137

5 Coatings, Filters, and Surface Finishes 165

6 Polarization 191

7 Exotic Optical Components 211

8 Fiber Optics 239

9 Optical Systems 279

10 Optical Measurements 315

11 Designing Electro-Optical Systems 343

12 Building Optical Systems 371

13 Signal Processing 405

14 Electronic Building Blocks 457

15 Electronic Subsystem Design 507

16 Electronic Construction Techniques 559

17 Digital Signal Processing 591

18 Front Ends 627

19 Bringing Up the System 665

20 Thermal Control 695

Appendix A Good Books 735

A.1 Why Books? 735

A.2 Good Books for Instrument Builders 735

Notation 743

Physical Constants and Rules of Thumb 745

Index 747

Textauszug

Preface

You are fools, to say you learn from your mistakes. I learn from the mistakes of other men.

Source: Otto von Bismarck.

This a book of lore.

Lore is an old word for wisdom and knowledge. While it often refers to magic and epic poetry, what I mean by it is altogether more homely: a mixture of experience, rules of thumb, bits of theory, and an indefinable feeling for the right way to do things, a sort of technical taste. It is what makes the difference between analyzing a design once completed and coming up with a good design to fit a particular purpose. Course work and textbooks have lots of analysis but most contain no lore whatsoever.

Lore is like piano playing: it lives in the fingers more than in the brain. In writing this book, I have often run up against the difference between how I do something and how I think I do it, or how I remember having done it. Since it's the actual lore of doing that is useful, I have where possible written or revised each section when I was actually doing that task or consulting with someone who was. Some of those sections have dates that reflect this.

Apologia

Lore is acquired slowly through experience and apprenticeship. Beginners pester experts, who help fairly willingly, mostly because they're kept humble by stepping in potholes themselves. This mutual aid system works but is slow and unsystematic. As a beginner, I once spent nearly six months trying to get a fancy laser interferometer to work properly, a task that would now take about a week. The reason was a breakdown in the apprenticeship system – everyone consulted said “Oh, that comes with practice.” Perfectly true, of course, and by no means unsympathetic, but not too helpful. Conversations with many others in the field indicate that this sort of thing is the rule and not the exception. Time, enthusiasm, and confidence are far too valuable to go wasting them like that.

This book is an attempt to provide a systematic and accessible presentation of the practical lore of electro‐optical instrument design and construction: in other words, it's the book I needed as a graduate student but couldn't find. It should be helpful for grad students at all levels, as well as practicing scientists and engineers: anyone who has electro‐optical systems to build and could use some advice. Its applicability ranges from experimental apparatus and proof‐of‐concept prototypes to mass‐produced industrial and consumer products.

The range of topics covered here is enormously broad, and I wish I were master of it all. Most of it was invented by others whose names I don't know; it's the lore of a whole field, as filtered through one designer's head. It's mostly been learned by watching and doing, or worked out with colleagues at a white board, rather by reading journal articles, so most sections have few references. For further reading, there is a list of 100 or so good books in Appendix A that should fill in the gaps.

I hope that this book may help erect bridges between subdisciplines, prevent common mistakes, and help all those working on an instrument project to see it as a whole. So much good stuff gets lost in the cracks between physics, electrical engineering, optical engineering, and computer science that a salvage attempt seemed justified. I apologize to those whose work has been acknowledged inadequately or whose priority has been overlooked, and hope that they can remember once needing a book like this.

Mission

Designing and constructing electro‐optical instruments is one of the most interdisciplinary jobs in all of engineering. It makes an absorbing and rewarding career, with little danger of growing stale. On the other hand, the same quality makes instrument building a bit scary and keeps us on our toes. Because of the very broad range of technologies involved, inevitably at least one vital subsystem lies outside the designer's expertise, presenting a very real danger of major schedule slippage or outright failure, which may not appear until very late in the project.

We in electro‐optics rely on whatever subset of these technologies we are familiar with, together with a combination of outside advice, collaboration, and purchased parts. Often, there are many ways of reaching the goal of a robust, working system; then the problem is where to start among a range of unfamiliar alternatives. It's like the classic text‐only computer game ADVENT : ‘ You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all different .’ Some judicious advice (and perhaps a map left by a previous adventurer) is welcome at such times, and that's what this book is about, the lore of designing and building electro‐optical instruments that work.

To have confidence in an instrument design, we have to be able to calculate its performance ahead of time without a huge elaborate simulation. It is a nontrivial matter, given the current fragmented state of the literature, to calculate what the resolution and signal‐to‐noise ratio of a measurement system will be before it is built. There's lots of information on how to calculate the performance of each lens, circuit, or algorithm; the trouble lies in the complexity of the task and the very different ways in which the results are expressed in the different fields encountered. For example, what is the effect of half a wave of primary spherical aberration in the objective lens on the optimal band‐setting filter in the analog signal processor, and then on the SNR of the ultimate digital data set? Somebody on the project had better be able to figure that out, and my aim is to make you that somebody.

The book is intended in the first instance for use by oppressed graduate students in physics and electrical engineering, who have to get their apparatus working long enough to take some data before they can graduate. When they do, they find that real‐world design work has much the same harassed and overextended flavor, so in the second instance, it's intended for working electro‐optical designers. It can be used as a text in a combined lecture‐laboratory course aimed at graduate students or fourth‐year undergraduates, and as a self‐teaching guide and professional reference by working designers.

The warm reception that the earlier editions have received suggests that despite the book's faults it has filled a real need. In this edition, as in the second, everything has been revised, and more than 100 pages' worth of new material has been added. The author has been a full‐time consultant for a dozen years now, and client work has supplied many absorbing problems and new wrinkles on old ones.

Organization

Textbooks usually aim at a linear presentation of concepts, in which the stuff on page does not depend on your knowing pages . This is because the reader is initially unfamiliar with the material and usually will go through the book sequentially, once, under the guidance of a teacher who is presenting information rapidly. Reference books are for people who already have a grasp of the topic but need to find more detail or remind themselves of things dimly remembered. Thus they tend to treat topics in clumps, emphasizing completeness, and to be weak on overall explanations, advice, and connections between these clumps.

Those two styles work pretty well in some subject areas, but design lore is not one of them. Its concepts aren't branched like a tree, or packed like eggs in a crate, but rather are interlinked like a fishnet or a sponge; thus a purely linear or clumped presentation of lore is all but impossible without doing violence to it. Nonetheless, to be any use, a lore book must be highly accessible, meaning easy enough to work through sequentially and attractive enough to leaf through many times.

Computer scientists use the concept of locality of reference – it's a good thing if an algorithm works mainly with data near each other in storage, but all the data have to be there, regardless. That's the way I have tried to organize this book: most of the lore on a particular topic is kept close together for conceptual unity and easy reference, but the topics are presented in a sufficiently linear order that later chapters build mainly on earlier ones, and important connections are noted in both forward and backward directions.1 A certain amount of messiness results, which hopefully has been kept close to a minimum. This approach gives rise to one minor oddity, which is that the same instruments are considered from different angles in different chapters, so some flipping of pages is required to see the whole design.

The book is organized into three sections: Optics; Electronics and Signal Processing; and Special Topics In Depth (Front Ends, Bringing Up The System, and Thermal Control). Chapter problems are available at https://electrooptical.net/building‐electrooptical‐systems/chapter‐problems.

The material is presented in varying levels of detail. The differences reflect the amount of published lore and the measured density of deep potholes that people fall into. For example, there are lots of potholes in optomechanical design, but weighty books of relevant advice fill shelf after shelf. Anyway, apart from scanners, mechanical problems aren't usually what cause instrument projects to fail – it's unexamined assumptions, inexperience, budget and schedule problems, and plain discouragement. We'll talk a lot...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 5.1.2022
• Reihe/Serie: Wiley Series in Pure and Applied Optics
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Technik ► Elektrotechnik / Energietechnik
• Schlagworte: Electrical & Electronics Engineering • Elektrotechnik u. Elektronik • Optics & Photonics • Optik u. Photonik • Optoelektronik • Photonics & Lasers • Photonik u. Laser • Physics • Physik
• ISBN-10: 1-119-43906-X / 111943906X
• ISBN-13: 978-1-119-43906-6 / 9781119439066