OPTI 424/524

11/08

OPTI 424/524.  Optical Systems Engineering (3 units) Spring.  This class provides opportunities for students to learn practical engineering skills for developing optical systems.  Students will work in groups on engineering projects and case studies that provide the opportunity to learn systems engineering skills first-hand.  Some examples of optical applications that may be covered are imaging, spectroscopy, illumination, adaptive optics, communication, detection, and metrology.  These systems will be used to teach fundamentals of systems engineering, optical system design, quantifying performance for optical systems, specification of optical components, and professional engineering skills.  

Offered as graduate and undergraduate

Class meets for three 50 min sessions per week in a conference room.

 Grading:

Grades will be based on participation (25%), homework (25%), technical reports (25%), and presentations (25%). 

Undergraduate students have fewer assignments. Their role in the groups will be less substantive.

 Topics to be covered

Systems Engineering fundamentals

            Establishing requirements

            Systematic design, applied to requirements

Risk management

Quality control, reliability

Optical system design

            First order architecture studies

            Creative design

            Trade studies (performance, cost, schedule, risk)

            Detailed design and analysis

            Tolerancing

Manufacturing issues

Integration and testing

 Quantifying system performance for optical systems

            Image quality metrics

Sensitivity

SNR

Spectral resolving power

ROC curves

Bit Error Rate

            Temporal bandwidth

Procurement of optical components and systems

            Specification of optics

            Specification of coatings

            Practical selection of detectors and focal planes

            Sources and illumination

            Electronic interfacing

 Professional skills

            Technical writing

            Technical presentations

            Working as part of a team

            Development of proposals

            Engineering decision making

Intellectual property

            Introductory project management

            Introductory finance

            Career planning

Special Topics

            Stray light (effect on performance and methods of controlling it)

            Illumination – etendue

            Infrared systems

 Possible optical systems used as design projects and case studies

            Machine vision

            Custom metrology system

            Infrared detection

            Free space communication

            Spectrograph

            Adaptive optics

Textbook: