Design of a freeform, luminance spreading illumination lens with a continuous surface

Given the high source luminance of current white LEDs, spreading this luminance in order to avoid glare, is a crucial aspect of effective LED lighting system design. In previous work, a method has been presented to design a rotational symmetric or extruded lens consisting of different freeform segments. These segments are designed in such a way that they spread the incoming rays into multiple overlapping fans of which the combination forms a desired target intensity pattern. The advantage of using freeform lens segments is that these can be precisely tailored to different target intensity patterns, e.g. intensity patterns with a sharp cut-off. The transformation of the incoming intensity distribution to the target intensity distribution can be seen as a linear transformation. If the source and target distributions are discretized into a finite number of bins, it is possible to represent this transformation as a matrix. With an iterative procedure one can quickly generate such transformations for specific source and target distributions. The spreading of light at each point of the optical surface can then be realized with small freeform lens segments. These individual freeform segments can be implemented in two different ways, convex or concave. In this paper, the case is considered in which convex and concave freeform structures are alternated which allows for the creation of a continuous, smooth, oscillating lens surface. This approach can improve both the performance and manufacturability when compared with a discontinuous surface. A drawback of the approach is the fact that one loses control over the overall form factor of the resulting lens. The derived iterative procedure was used to design a luminance spreading illumination lens with smooth, wavy structures on one side and a flat surface on the other side. The lens was designed to generate a specific wide-beam target intensity distribution when combined with a high-brightness LED.

Jaar van publicatie:2018

Trefwoorden:Freeform Optics, Glare, Illumination, LED optics, Luminance spreading

Auteurs:International

Toegankelijkheid:Closed