Static logo projection lamp optical design for automotive lighting applications

Projection lamps are a lighting technology that has been used in the automotive industry in recent years, providing the opportunity to get in and out of the vehicle safely by illuminating the surroundings of vehicles with a logo image, and aiming to minimize accident rates by reflecting turn and reverse signal lights on the ground. In this study, which was carried out by considering the Köhler lighting concept, which is one of the design approaches of modern illumination systems, light emitting diode (LED) was used as the illumination source. In the automotive lighting industry, polymer materials and injection molds are used to easily produce light-bending surfaces and enable mass production at low cost. In the design of the system, the optical properties of the polymer materials (Polycarbonate (PC) and Polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA) to be used in lenses and the limitations of injection molding technology were used as input in ANSYS Zemax OpticStudio, an optical design and analysis program. This logo lamp, located inside the exterior rearview mirror housing, has dimensional restrictions due to other components inside the mirror. For this reason, the number and size of lenses to be used in optical design are designed to be as small as possible while providing sufficient optical output performance. Thus, the optical design and performance analysis of a logo projection lamp that complies with the design requirements, has a compact structure with three lenses, optimized optical deviations and uniform light intensity distribution were carried out.