Applicability of glass for transmission LED optics

For LED lighting applications, Fresnel lenses or TIR lenses are frequently made of optical plastics. Glass, however, can offer a number of advantages, including higher resistance to heat, to UV light, and to chemicals like solvents. In this work, several glass materials for transmission optics are compared. The transmittances are evaluated, including Fresnel losses and absorption, as well as shifts of the chromaticity coordinates and of the color rendering index. TIR lenses made of Suprax borosilicate glass and polycarbonate are compared concerning their contour accuracies and their resulting photometric properties like luminous intensity distributions, luminous fluxes, and chromaticity distributions.