Colleagues:
Hey, Control Systems Engineers, this one’s for you! I’m sure you remember
my dear friend who likes to declare, “You have to know the answer before
you do the analysis!” And his wicked “eye-twinkle” was part
of that message too. I used him then as a vehicle to highlight the
importance of engineers making estimates and developing a “sense of
smell” about the quality of their decisions.
So, my question for you is: How do you incorporate the line-of-sight into
the MatLab model of your “stabilized” optical system?
Well, AEH knows of three ways: 1) You can calculate it
yourself, from the optical prescription, and insert it in your MatLab file, with
some luck, or 2) you can copy the Optomechanical Constraint Equations
(OCE) from Ivory and patch
them into your Matlab file, with a little better luck, or
3) you can speak nicely enough to the structural engineer for him or her to
import the OCE (from Ivory)
into his FE model and the resulting eigenvectors, BINGO and…
If you want to learn more here’s an
opportunity: On August 7th, all day, I’ll be
teaching my course, Optomechanical Analysis, for SPIE’s
Symposium Optics+Photonics 2017 at San Diego’s Convention Center and
Marriott Marina Hotel. The first half of the course is all about the OCE,
how you generate them and how they’re used. Then you might stick around
for our Conference, Optomechanics 2017,
on the 8th and 9th to find out what everyone else is doing. On Tuesday
evening, the 8th, I’ll be hosting a meeting of the Optomechanical Technical Group between 8
and 10. Dan Vukobratovich will be our principal speaker followed by an
open discussion.
Yeah, you guessed it. My dear friend is a control systems engineer.
One of the things I did for him was to assure that the structural engineer
incorporated Ivory’s OCE into
the FE model that produced the eigenvectors he used in MatLab to design the
control system. Later system tests on the shaker-table confirmed the
quality “smell” of this decision. Ivory nailed it, dead-on!
I’ll see all of you in San Diego!
Al H.
7-10-17