Strain/Stress profile investigation of crystals mounted in an optical instrument via FEM simulation

Abstract: Abstract This work is one of a series of related papers that were made in Lund University. They were done to analyze in a multi scalar way the Yttrium Orthosilicate crystals (YSO), analyzing the variation of material properties stemmed from the mounting, composition and other parameters in the optical properties of Yttrium Orthosilicate crystals. This paper specifically focused on investigating the effect of the photoelasticity on the characteristics of the crystal, modeling the Strain/Stress effect on optical properties of pure and doped crystals due to variations in the mounting via FEM simulation. In this work all the process is done with a combination of softwares firstly Abaqus and then Matlab. It starts with the creation and development of a finite element model with adequate material properties and boundary conditions as in the references. To achieve an optical model the simulations were done with various geometries, material orientations, loads and load cases. From these procedures in Abaqus an output for the stress was generated and post processed in Matlab to generate the photoelasticity output. Both the stress and photoelasticity results are presented through this paper. With this combined procedure this paper was able to present an optimized way to model the variation in optical properties of the crystal in its pure form and doped with Eu. Presenting indications of the effect of the variation in load type, load modulus and crystal orientation being able to present a comparison between them and suggesting future works to increase the knowledge on the topic and optimize the modeling even more.