LEDs offer enormous potential for dozens of applications, but they require a new infrastructure and unique components. Achieving uniform light patterns, color mixing and required beam patterns from a point source like an LED require the involvement of experienced optical engineers.
Our customers have turned to us to design reflectors, optics and lenses for flash lights, street lighting, microscopes, aviation, automobile, commercial and home lighting, light pipes and many more.
The optical engineer’s process begins with a ray set from one or more LEDs. The ray set is a map of 10,000 - 1,0000,000 individual rays of light as the come off the LED.
Using this ray set the data is inputted into a ray tracing program like Zemax.
You can watch a short video here of the process.
To start a project, you can provide answers to the following questions:
Which LED do you use? If it is a major LED ( CREE, Osram, Luxeon, Nichia, Luminus etc) we probably have the ray set. If it is a less popular brand we will need the LED ray set provided by the manufacturer. This is essential input data into our optical model.
How many LED’s, if more than one what is the desired spacing?
Do you have any mechanical limits on the size of the lens or optic?
What beam angles do you require? Or in other terms, what size and shape spot do you want and from what distance do you want this spot?
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