Light pipes are useful for non conventional illumination problems in cars, for displays, etc. The design of such devices is a challenging problem because of the large number of parameters. Depending on the application, the light pipes have various shapes and dimensions. This paper investigates different design strategies for light pipe illumination devices. A new generation of commercially available non- sequential ray-tracing programs allow the analysis of scattering light pipes. However, the modeling of complex optical systems requires the knowledge of the physical behavior and the related numerical algorithms. For the design optimization, ray-tracing is too cumbersome because of the large number of necessary rays. Therefore, we introduce a finite element approach to describe the power transfer through appropriately chosen volume elements. This method gives a good estimation of the macroscopic behavior of the light pipe. The fine tuning of the different pipe parameters is made easier. In addition, the possibility to simulate the light pipe in its surrounding environment by means of global illumination methods is discussed.

Date Published: 20 October 1998
PDF: 11 pages
Proc. SPIE 3428, Illumination and Source Engineering, (20 October 1998); doi: 10.1117/12.327967

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 3428:
Illumination and Source Engineering
Angelo V. Arecchi, Editor(s)