Shaping and homogenization of LED light
The VirtualLab™ Lighting Toolbox provides field tracing for the analysis and design of illumination systems. Field tracing enables the usage of new concepts with emphasis on the integration of microstructures and diffractive optics. That gives more flexibility for the design of compact illumination systems for the homogenization and shaping of LED light as well as light of other sources with highly divergent radiation.
The Lighting Toolbox comes with an innovative light shaping concept which is based on an array of gratings, mirrors or prisms. In the first version, only gratings are available. Each cell of the array deflects the light into predefined directions and results in a light spot in the target plane. The light spots of all array cells together form the desired light pattern.
The analysis and design applies field tracing from the source to the target plane and takes into account refraction, diffraction, and interference effects. The light emitted from the source, e.g. the LED, is modeled including color, spatial and temporal partial coherence, and polarization.
Your Benefit
- Simulated 2D light pattern generated by a grating cells array component.
- Additional flexibility for the development of compact illumination systems for the homogenization and shaping of LED light.
- Design of optical elements for the generation of light patterns and light marks.
- The modeling of LED and other sources includes power spectrum, spatial and temporal coherence and polarization by built in source models or source data import.
- Field tracing to analyze arrays of micro-structured gratings.
Selected Features
Analysis of cells array component. The Lighting Toolbox provides a planar component with a grating cells array on one side of it. Each cell deflects the light in a predefined direction. This effect can be basically analyzed by ray tracing. However, then both the diffraction at the cell apertures and the partial interference of the spots in the target plane are not taken into account. Since the Lighting Toolbox provides also the field tracing analysis it includes all these effects.
Electromagnetic analysis of grating cells. The application of grating cells to deflect LED light requires small periods of the gratings in the cells array. That demands an electromagnetic analysis of the diffraction efficiency of the gratings, in order to predict the light distribution in the target plane correctly. Together with the Grating Toolbox the Lighting Toolbox enables such a sophisticated analysis of the grating cells array.
LED source modeling. The Lighting Toolbox comes with an built in electromagnetic LED source model. It includes the bandwidth, the spatial and temporal coherence, as well as the polarization of the LED. To this end a cosine type radiant intensity is assumed. Users possessing measured data of the radiant intensity and the near field of the LED may import the data into the source model.
- Ray tracing analysis of cells array component in reflection mode.
Design algorithm for cells array component. The Lighting Toolbox provides a design algorithm which calculates the functional parameters of the cells array component for the generation of a binary intensity distribution. The optical resolution is controlled by the cell diameter and the number of cells. The resulting components are able to generate both, rectangular and circular top hats, lines and binary customized 2D intensity patterns. Alternatively, the user can import a customized data set to specify all fundamental cells array parameters.
Generation of fabrication data. Design and analysis result in data that specify the grating cells array. The Lighting Toolbox supports the export in CSV format and in GDSII-format including the calculation of etching masks.