Phase Space Ray Tracing for a Two-dimensional Parabolic Reflector

C Filosa,W L Ijzerman,J H M Thije Boonkkamp

doi:10.13189/ms.2017.050401

Abstract

Ray tracing is a technique used in geometric optics for calculating the light distribution at the target of an optical system. Monte Carlo (MC) ray tracing is very common in non-imaging optics. We propose a new ray tracing method that employs the phase space of the source and the target of the system. The new method gives a more accurate target distribution than classical MC ray tracing and requires less computational time. It is tested for two-dimensional optical systems. The results for the paraboloid reflector are provided.

Highlights

Given a light source and an optical system, ray tracing is a forward method to describe how light propagates through the system
The method was tested for a two-dimensional optical system with two parabolic mirrors
Assuming a Lambertian source, the output intensity can be computed from the location of the intersection points of the regions with the lines with p = const

Summary

Introduction

Given a light source and an optical system, ray tracing is a forward method to describe how light propagates through the system. At that point the ray changes the direction, which needs to be calculated in order to compute the surface that the ray hits This procedure is repeated for a large number of rays. To implement the ray tracing procedure, only the coordinates of the intersection point between the ray and the optical lines and the direction of the ray are needed The space where both these variables are described simultaneously is called phase space (PS). The difference between the TIR collimator analyzed in [5] and the parabolic reflector is that for the latter case the refinement procedure has to be very fine to detect many paths This leads to a large number of path and potentially a long computational time. The last section of the article provides conclusions and insights about future possible prospectives to extend the method

Monte Carlo ray tracing

Ray tracing on phase space

Numerical results

Conclusions