Precision Engineering with CODE V’s UserTol: Four Real-World Optical Tolerancing Scenarios

CODE V’s tolerancing tools are critical for engineers designing optics in all applications, from space systems to cell phone cameras. In this webinar, we will demonstrate how to use UserTol, CODE V’s newest tolerancing tool, to tackle four real-world tolerancing challenges. These include specifying your own tolerances, defining practical and flexible compensation processes, and evaluating your as-built system using customized performance metrics.

UserTol offers powerful new capabilities such as parallel processing to improve the speed of tolerancing, multi-step alignment process simulation and the ability to track multiple performance metrics simultaneously. It compliments CODE V’s existing tools: TOR, a rapid wavefront differential tolerancing method; and TOL, for aberration based tolerancing. UserTol provides new capabilities that make it a suitable replacement to TOLMONTE for performing user-defined tolerancing for Monte Carlo tolerance analysis, and to TOLFDIF for finite differences tolerancing.

Rainer Jetter has over 35 years of experience in practical optical imaging design. After studying physics and astronomy at the Ruprecht-Karls University in Heidelberg, he joined AGFA-GEVAERT AG in Munich to become a classical lens designer and, subsequently, the head of the optical design group there. It was even then that his main fields of interest included fabrication tolerances in optical design. Together with Dr. Geoff Adams, one of the authors of the Kidger tolerancing program, he examined its applicability by comparing predictions made under that program to results turned in at AGFA’s optical shop. Thereafter, he worked part-time as a freelance optical designer for various companies such as Zeiss Oberkochen, as well as part-time as an employee at Rodenstock Präszisionoptik and Schneider-Kreuznach. During his professional life, he has designed more than 100 optical systems that have made their way to success. Part of that success was based on his reasoned view that fabrication tolerancing is a crucial stage of the optical design process. For more than ten years now, Rainer Jetter has taught special courses on tolerancing in lens design at optical companies and at the University of Applied Sciences in Munich.