Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2013

Keywords

Optimal transportation theory, Reflector design

Abstract

We consider the geometric optics problem of finding a system of two reflectors that transform a spherical wavefront into a beam of parallel rays with prescribed intensity distribution. Using techniques from optimal transportation theory, it has been shown previously that this problem is equivalent to an infinite-dimensional linear programming (LP) problem. Here we investigate techniques for constructing the two reflectors numerically by considering the finite dimensional LP problems which arise as approximations to the infinite dimensional problem. A straightforward discretization has the disadvantage that the number of constraints increases rapidly with the mesh size, so only very coarse meshes are practical. To address this well-known issue we propose an iterative solution scheme. In each step an LP problem is solved, where information from the previous iteration step is used to reduce the number of necessary constraints. As an illustration we apply our proposed scheme to solve a problem with synthetic data, demonstrating that the method allows for much finer meshes than a simple discretization. We also give evidence that the scheme converges. There exists a growing literature for the application of optimal transportation theory to other beam shaping problems, and our proposed scheme is easy to adapt for these problems as well.

Publication Title

ISRN Applied Mathematics

Volume

Article ID 635263

DOI

http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2013/635263

Required Publisher's Statement

Copyright © 2013 Tilmann Glimm and Nick Henscheid. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2013/635263

Subjects - Topical (LCSH)

Reflectors, Lighting--Design and construction--Mathematical models; Geometrical optics; Mathematical optimization

Genre/Form

articles

Type

Text

Rights

Copying of this document in whole or in part is allowable only for scholarly purposes. It is understood, however, that any copying or publication of this document for commercial purposes, or for financial gain, shall not be allowed without the author’s written permission.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Language

English

Format

application/pdf

COinS