Optical System
Simulator
During my studies, we examined thin lens optical systems. I noticed that our professor could spend a lot of time drawing the path of light through the lenses. The diagram could lack precision and therefore clarity. It also seemed pedagogically interesting to allow students to experiment with different lens configurations themselves.
That's when I came up with an idea to program a software that allows you to simulate the path of light through a customizable optical system.
The Software
Software Architecture.
The software consists of 3 windows:
• A menu
• A display of the diagram
• A display of calculation results
Architecture
Presentation of the different windows
Menu
The menu is divided into 4 parts:
• (1): Here, we initialize the light source.
The automatic scale box allows you to scale the diagram so that all important elements are represented.
The Diagram button displays the optical system's trace.
The Results button displays the calculation results.
• (2): Here, we set the thin lenses to add.
You can choose whether to display the construction lines of the object's images through the lens.
• (3): Here, we have a list of the different added lenses.
It is possible to delete or modify the selected lens.
• (4): This part of the menu only needs to be modified if the automatic scale box is unchecked.
It allows for manual scaling of the diagram.
Diagram
Here is the plot corresponding to the previous menu.
We can observe the variation in the thickness of the light beam as it passes through the optical system.
(PS: The output image of this optical system is at infinity)
Calculations
Here is the result of the various calculations that allowed the diagram to be plotted.
Results
What is the software capable of?
Basic optical systems
With this software, it is possible to represent all optical systems composed of 1 to 10 thin lenses. It is a particularly effective educational tool to aid in the understanding of optics. My physics teacher at the time was particularly interested in this project and obtained a copy of the software.