Hi James,

Thanks for posting on our forums!

Are you looking for definitions that other folks have already made based on a specific method for layering optical coatings? Do you happen to know (perhaps from your vendor or whomever is performing the optical coating application) any characteristic information about the final coating layer outcome? There are certainly a lot of ways you could go about defining the shape of a coating layer with the TAPR functionality, but I suppose the other side of the coin is that you’d need to know what you’re fitting the TAPR definition to based on the result of your particular supplier.

Perhaps this is also what you’re looking for, but if you did have some kind of information about the final layer shape, we could potentially provide more comments on leveraging TAPR to obtain that shape.

Thanks!

Hi Angel,

Yes, that is all true about modeling what we’re getting, at least that’s what we’d like to do.  I met with our coating engineers today about what sort of coating displacement range they were getting, if the cosine taper I had (true cosine clike what’s in the manual]) was similar to theirs (they said “yes” but said we would likely have to apply other tapers as well).  So that’s where we are at on that, namely trying to figure out where we are!

Thanks.

James

I do think that this is one of those cases where the code’s ability to model exceeds the user’s ability to enter the data  Getting good data on this kind of things from coatings manufacturers is hard. OS supports three types of tapers, which can be used simultaneously plus decenter terms. The ones offered were based on Angus Macleod’s recommendation as to what was most useful. But getting coating engineers to tell you what the actually do is harder!

Thanks for the response, Mark.  I think you are right on the money regarding the code’s ability vs. the user’s on this one.  Our in-house coating engineers are working to extract some representative data for modeling purposes so we can see what’s what.

Turns out that the OpticStudio cosine taper produces coating layer thickness non-uniformity that, for the most part, matches what our coating engineers get from Table Mountain Optics Uniformity Pro software.