Large aperture collimator which has been widely used for calibrating and testing various optical devices plays an essential role in correlative laboratories. As being the basic testing and calibration equipment, the large aperture collimator’s accuracy should be much higher than the device under testing in order to ensure the accuracy of the measurement. However, the process of adjusting the collimator is extremely complicated due to the collimator’s large aperture and long focal length. So it is difficult to ensure the measurement’s quality and easy to cause the system being vulnerable to the surrounding environment. One of the most common problems is defocus. In order to solve the problem above, this issue presents a new type of autocollimator autofocusing system which uses pentaprism instead of using large-aperture plane mirror, semiconductor lasers as light source and CCD sensor as receiver. The system is smaller, lighter, and more convenient when using. The computer simulation shows that the autofocusing system’s resolution could reach the accuracy of 40μm. If we use the relevant algorithms to execute the sub-pixel scanning, the resolution could reach the accuracy of 10μm. It shows that the system could satisfy the required testing precision of testing large aperture optical device.
Computer simulation of thermal focal length of laser crystal and thermally-near-unstable resonator
