Knowing how a lens, a reflector or a light-guide will behave before manufacturing saves a lot of time and money. Using photometric modelling DIVERSE maximise the efficiency of a design so that the manufactured article will work within pre-set parameters.

Imagine you have a product with an LED on a circuit board some distance from the position where you'd like light to be viewed. One way to solve this problem is to design a plastic light guide to port the light, from the LED, to the point of interest. Conversely you may wish to project as much light energy from a particular tungsten source onto a predefined target area. These problems, and numerous others like them, are best solved by using photometric modelling. Diverse have extensive experience of photometric modelling for a wide range of clients including Ford, General Motors, 3Com, Psion, Motorola, Saab, CCT/Strand, ADB , Zero88 and others.

As with any model, the most reliable results are obtained with attention to detail. The sort of details which are important in photometric modelling are refractive index, wavelenth of radiation, reflectivity and scattering to name a few. Diverse use CAD to produce complex 3D shapes which are then imported into optical CAD, (opticad).

As an example, Diverse would tackle the light guide problem mentioned earlier in the following way. Firstly a model of the LED would be obtained (provided Diverse's library did not already contain the specific device). To do this physical measurements are obtained from the LED along with polar diagrams. A model of the LED is then produced in opticad and traced with a large number of rays (typically a million or greater). The modelled polar diagram is then compared to the measured one and the model modified if necessary. Having obtained a good model for the LED a first attempt at the guide would be designed using optical design and mechanical CAD and imported into the photometric ray tracer, and then ray traced to assess its performance. Further iterations would be undertaken to optimise the guide performance.

This example highlights the main advantage of photometric modelling which is the ability to assess different optical designs before any prototypes are produced. When a prototype is produced the client is confident that it will perform to specification.

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