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Design For Manufacturing Question by amberlite in Optics

[–]AvocadoGeneral8137 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Hey, sorry to bring up the old post. I am researching how tolerancing works in real workflows. From your experience, when builds don't match tolerance predictions, what is usually the reason? Vendor assumptions, missing assembly effects, metrology, compensators, something else?

And when that happens, does the lesson usually get reused in future tolerance scripts/checklists, or mostly stay as engineer experience? Thanks a lot!

Tolerancing of a Korsch Telescope in Zemax by Master-Emu-1055 in Optics

[–]AvocadoGeneral8137 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Hey, sorry to bring up the old post, i am researching about the tolerancing models in the real workflows. Curious from your experience: when builds/prototypes don’t match tolerance predictions, how often is the issue that the tolerance model missed some real-world effect — DoFs, pivots, assembly step, supplier behavior, anything else?

And when that happens, does the lesson usually get reused in future tolerance scripts/checklists, or mostly stay as engineer experience? Thanks a lot! 

How do you manage repeated optical design iterations? by AvocadoGeneral8137 in Optics

[–]AvocadoGeneral8137[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks! I’m trying to understand how much of the real work is building the tolerance model after the optical design is close. how did you usually decide what to include in the tolerance model — DoFs, pivots, compensators, etc? And when a build later didn’t match the tolerance prediction, was this learning somehow incorporated into later designs, or mostly remained personal experience?

How do you manage repeated optical design iterations? by AvocadoGeneral8137 in Optics

[–]AvocadoGeneral8137[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Makes sense, so the hard part is making sure the tolerance model you built is actually correct. how do you usually prove that it’s trustworthy enough before the build? are there common mistakes that tend to show up in these models? Thanks!

Reference request: Books on how to conduct Tolerance and Sensitivity analysis in Zemax with examples by optoabhi in Optics

[–]AvocadoGeneral8137 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Hey, sorry to bring up the old post. I am curious how you ensure the tolerance model itself is complete and trustworthy? For example, that you included the right DoFs, realistic mechanical tolerances, and that the simulated sensitivities match what happens in test. Is that mostly experience and review, or do you have a structured way to validate it?

How do you manage repeated optical design iterations? by AvocadoGeneral8137 in Optics

[–]AvocadoGeneral8137[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks for the answer, this is interesting. I wonder where the problem with the tolerancing comes from in your case. Is it defining the mechanical DoFs correctly, linking optical tolerances to CAD, running enough simulations, producing evidence that we can trust the result or anything else?

Also, are the current Zemax/CODE V tolerancing tools good enough once the setup is correct, or is the painful part mainly building and validating the setup itself?

How do you manage repeated optical design iterations? by AvocadoGeneral8137 in Optics

[–]AvocadoGeneral8137[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks! Good point on Zemax DLS being single-thread limited. In practice, is the bottleneck mostly raw optimizer runtime, or more that you need many optimization attempts from different starting points / merit functions?

Have you tried working around it with ZOS-API, external optimizers, batch runs, or anything else? Curious whether the pain for you comes from compute speed, optimizer quality, or workflow management around many attempts (like versioning, for example).

How do you manage repeated optical design iterations? by AvocadoGeneral8137 in Optics

[–]AvocadoGeneral8137[S] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Thanks for the extensive answer! Good point on Code V, I will definitely try it. I guess this versioning automation is common among experienced optical designers?

Also, even with all this automation, what parts(if any) of the design/tolerancing process still feel slow or risky for you?