After many years of light guide design and development for a diverse range of industries, POAL has applied for a patent on a new light guide manufacturing technique to aid illumination control in the automotive and similar applications.
GloWorm® can be redirected and shaped to produce a more complex illumination field, or a specific illumination footprint on to a target surface.
The light control structure on the light guide is digitally designed using POAL’s own proprietary developed software, and with inputs from illumination analyses performed in POAL’s optical design and analysis software.
The digital structure is bi-directionally transferred between the optical design software and the GloWorm® software to optimise the resulting illumination field.
The resulting light control structure can then be directly machined to soft-tooled or vacuum cast prototype lightguides for customer verification, before the patterns are finally machined into the production mould tools for volume manufacture.
This technology has a wide range of applications where specific areas of a vehicle interior are to be illuminated with a defined footprint of light, such as armrests, console walls, door pocket interiors, etc.
For example, in a typical door pocket illumination design, where the lightguide is mounted in the pocket edge to illuminate the facia of the door lining, the shape of the door facia will change the distance between the lightguide and target surface.
This will give a variation in the illumination brightness and footprint width across the door facia target surface. However, with POAL’s GloWorm® technology, we can control the illumination brightness, width and position at every point across the door facia, to give an optimum, uniform, aesthetically pleasing, illumination scheme.
If we can do that, we can correct for almost any automotive interior illumination geometry or produce unusual illumination effects.
