Optical design techniques for environmentally resilient optical computing devices

A method of fabricating an integrated computational element (ICE), comprising:

• loading an ICE design into a processor configured to execute one or more programming stances provided by a fabrication computer program stored on a non-transitory, computer-readable medium, the ICE design being configured to detect a characteristic of interest and comprising a plurality of layers;
• approximating a spectral shift on the ICE design resulting from an expected temperature shift, wherein approximating the spectral shift includes calculating a theoretical effect of the expected temperature shift for at least one layer of the ICE design;
• setting a deposition configuration for the at least one layer based on a sensitivity of the at least one layer to a corresponding standard error of calibration;
• and
• commencing fabrication of the ICE.

A method of designing and manufacturing an integrated computational element (ICE), comprising:

• generating a plurality of ICE designs with a design suite stored on a non-transitory, computer-readable medium, each ICE design comprising at least one of a random number of layers and a random thickness for each layer;
• optimizing the plurality of ICE designs based on performance criteria and thereby generating a plurality of theoretical ICE designs configured to detect a characteristic of interest;
• sorting the theoretical ICE designs based on the performance criteria in view of a known value for the characteristic of interest and thereby identifying one or more predictive ICE designs;
• approximating a spectral shift on each predictive ICE design resulting from an expected temperature shift, wherein approximating the spectral shift includes calculating a theoretical effect of the expected temperature shift on each individual layer of each predictive ICE design;
• selecting for fabrication at least one predictive ICE design based on favorable temperature stability in view of the calculated theoretical effect of the expected temperature shift;
• loading the at least one predictive ICE design into a processor configured to execute one or more programming stances provided by a fabrication computer program stored on a non-transitory, computer-readable medium;
• setting a deposition configuration for each layer of the at least one predictive ICE based on a sensitivity of each layer to a corresponding standard error of calibration;
• and
• commencing fabrication of the ICE.