Design of an optoelectronic sensor for beam displacement measurements: application to laser triangulation

摘要

In this work, different configurations of optoelectronic systems are designed and studied to be used as displacement measurement systems. They consist in a discrete array of photodetectors which estimate the position of an incident beam that can be applied for laser triangulation. The output of the detection system is obtained by means of the discrete elements that form the array. We propose to make a linear combination of the outputs of the photodetectors to generate a signal that is proportional to the displacements. For this purpose, we develop a numerical calculation in order to estimate the optimum weights of the different outputs. We consider two topologies of four photodetectors: one formed by a single line of discrete elements, and the other, formed by two rows. In order to analyze the performance of the detection system, we simulate the behavior of the array considering different incident beam diameters and the two topologies. Therefore, we design detection systems that provide adequate results for different beam diameters and are tolerant to the shape of the beam profile.