The Ray Summary command prints to the output window the ray counts and total incoherent power for all rays associated with traceable objects (sources and surfaces marked traceable), subject to the user-supplied ray selection criteria. Rays associated with untraceable objects are omitted from the Ray Summary and each ray’s associated surface name is given using the hierarchy naming convention.
The power reported by this analysis will NOT be correct for coherent rays, since a coherent field summation is not performed as part of the analysis. The reported data can still be useful for determining "where" the rays are located in the system and how much relative relative power is distributed among the surfaces.
This command can be accessed in the following ways: •Menu > Analyses > Ray Summary •Shift + F11 •Toolbar button:
A Ray Selection Criteria dialog is presented to the user when the analysis function is called, which allows the user to construct a set of ray selection filters to be applied to the reported data. The printed Ray Summary report will only contain information about rays which pass the ray selection filter requirement. Additionally, the dialog itself remembers the ray selection filter settings that were applied to it the last time it was called so that the Ray Summary analysis can be called repeatedly without needing to redefine the ray selection filter set each time.
Say, for example, that the desired output is to report the ray counts and total power for all rays on all surfaces in the model. The appropriate ray selection filter to achieve this is the default "All Rays" criteria.
Now, depending on the size of the model being analyzed, the default "All Rays" criteria may result in hundreds or thousands of rows of reported data. It may be convenient to reduce the set of reported data to include only rays that are of specific interest, such as those on a detector (or multiple detectors). To achieve this, the ray selection filter can be set to use the option, "Rays on the specified surface", and the resulting Ray Summary report will only include the output for rays satisfying this requirement.
A ray is associated with the last surface that it intersected. If a ray has not been traced or it did not intersect a surface, then it is associated with the source that defined it. Unless the ray position is otherwise altered after a ray trace, the ray’s location will be at the last surface intersection position or at the source definition position.
Rays that were suppressed from being created during the raytrace, by power cutoff thresholds, ancestry thresholds, etc., will not be reported during the Ray Summary analysis because those rays were never created during the raytrace and added to the ray buffer.
The Absorbed Rays option of a Raytrace Property definition is intended to allow for tracking of power conservation in the raytrace. As a simple example, consider a ray with unit power incident on a specular surface whose coating transmits 90% and reflects 8%. The surface raytrace control does not allow specular reflection but does use the Absorbed Rays option. During the raytrace, an untraceable "absorbed" ray will be deposited on this surface at the point of the incident ray's intersection and will have power P_abs = P_incident - P_outgoing. In this formulation, P_outgoing is the total ray flux from all rays leaving the surface due to the incident ray's interaction. In this example, the only outgoing ray is the transmitted ray with 90% of the incident power. Consequently, the power in the absorbed ray would be 0.10. Note that the physical absorption of this surface is only 2%. When absorbed rays are active, power values reported by the Ray Summary command should not be taken as a measure of the surface's physical absorption characteristics in all cases. The power values reported indicate the physical surface absorption plus the outgoing power suppressed by the raytrace control or surface scatter settings.
Surface Incident / Absorbed Power
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