An innovative vehicle headlamp design based on a high-efficiency LED light pipe system

Abstract

We propose an innovative vehicle headlight design based on a highly efficient LED light pipe system. In the system, light rays are emitted from multiple high-power LEDs in front of a total internal reflection (TIR) lens. After passing through the TIR lens, the rays are divided into two beams by a prism splitter, and each beam is guided to each headlamp by a light pipe. We propose the system because it uses fewer LEDs but provides enough lumens and reduces the number of TIR lenses required. Detailed analysis of the system is given, and the simulation results show that the headlamp produces a legal Economic Commission for Europe (ECE) lowbeam pattern, with a total optical efficiency up to 40.2%, when four LED (Lumileds-K2) sources are used.

Publisher’s Note:

“…Compared with the previous methods about the freeform construction and the headlamp design, such as Refs. [2,8,12] introduced, our method can achieve good results in much more simply and quickly. In Ref.…”

“…The optical system is rather complex in Ref. [12]. Moreover, our method mainly focuses on the long distance (25 m or more) nonuniform illumination for the LED source, while the distance for general uniform illuminations is about 10 m [19,22].…”

“…LEDs have been widely used in automobile front headlamps, especially in low-beam and high-beam headlamps [7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16]. However, there are few literatures reported on high-power LED front fog lamps with a small and compact size.…”

Design method of a light emitting diode front fog lamp based on a freeform reflector

“…LEDs have been widely used in automobile front headlamps, especially in low-beam and high-beam headlamps [7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16]. However, there are few literatures reported on high-power LED front fog lamps with a small and compact size.…”

Design of an optical lens combined with a total internal reflection (TIR) freeform surface for a LED front fog lamp

“…LED has been widely used in automobile headlights, especially in the low beam and high beam headlamps [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10], but few literatures have been reported about the high-power with small compact LED for front fog lamps. Reference [11] has disclosed a front fog lamp for a vehicle.…”