Hi

The atmospheric turbulence can be modelled in several ways:

- One way is to model the scattering due to the atmosphere. Please check these two articles:

• How to simulate atmospheric scattering using a Mie model



• Polarization-sensitive scattering in OpticStudio

- Another way can be to model the shift of the wavefront / phase. In that case, we can model that aberration with any of the following:

• Zernike phase surface



• Grid Phase surface



• User defined surface DLL

With each of these, you will need to calculate the expected defocus or phase shift. One of my colleague had done a research on this and here are some papers that were able to model the turbulence aberration within Zemax in this way:

• https://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/pdf/2008/02/aa7996-07.pdf



• https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/11141573.pdf

It may be helpful to get in touch with the authors of these papers to get their input.

Also, in Sequential Mode, we provide an Atmospheric surface which could potentially approximate the effect you’re looking for. This is another phase-shifting surface. For more information, check the help file:  The Setup Tab > Editors Group (Setup Tab) > Lens Data Editor > Sequential Surfaces (lens data editor) > Atmospheric.

Sandrine

Thanks Sandrine!

Hi Sandrine, sometimes we need to keep changing the turbulence phase screen to have a dynamic result of the turbulence process. Is there any way to automatically update the phase screen, say either replace the old one with a new generated phase screen or simply rotate the old screen? And if I want to change the number of the screens, is there any easy way other than manually adjust the screen's location and insert or delete screens?