OpticStudio TrueFreeform(TM) optimization for complex illumination systems

In recent years, there is a growing need for lighting equipment that creates complex, specific illumination and light intensity distributions, such as road surface drawing lamps, aesthetic design lighting, and direct backlighting. When designing such lighting equipment, we may often have to use a cut-off method, which is a method of projecting a partially shaded image. This method is inefficient for many reasons, as we are purposefully cutting off the light source for illumination. The development of manufacturing capabilities has made feasible the fabrication of more complex optical components, with the freeform shape as its highest candidate. This has opened up the possibility of new design approaches. We propose a design solution that meets the high demand for illumination performance in a more straightforward configuration, using complex free-form surfaces and a ray mapping approach as opposed to flooding the detector with millions of non-sequential rays. A conventional optical surface utilizes a parametric equation for the illumination lens, which can be challenging to control for higher orders of the polynomial function. The optical lens designed with conventional methods require complex parts and, in the end, has a low light efficiency due to the shading of the light source. The proposed illumination method takes advantage of a lighter computational approach via ray mapping and leverages the spatially selective surface sag over a grid of points in the OpticStudio TrueFreeForm surface.