Conventional reflectors manage to control the off-axis light from the source, but don’t control the light that misses the top edge of the reflector, so a lot of light is wasted into a halo around the central spot beam.
The POL’s Hybrid Reflector design means the light collection efficiency can be driven up to >90% with a more controlled, narrower, higher intensity beam.
To make the Hybrid Reflector products, POL has developed a novel in-mould production process to make the reflector and integration features in one process and provide easy assembly of the central lens and modular LED mounting.
The perfect colour mixing can be achieved with the POL Colour Mixer Hybrid Reflector optics, allowing an infinite range of illumination colours to be produced with a constant and stable beam geometry. An additional advantage is that the appearance of the emitted light from the optic is a uniform mixed colour too, removing the usual visible spots of RGB seen in other colour mixing approaches.
POL also produce reflector products by conventional metal spinning and using vacuum metallisation of plastic moulded reflector substrates, but similarly POL can integrate the Hybrid Reflector central lens component into these other production routes.
An additional modular design approach is to use beam converter optics fitted over the standard reflectors to give different beam angles. This approach gives a modular, flexible product design with the minimum number of component parts. The beam converter optics are either supplied pre-assembled to the base reflector product or can be supplied separately, so that customers can customise product assemblies at point of manufacture or point of installation.
The POL Hybrid Reflector products can also be fitted with a novel optical integrator design to provide beam smoothing and colour variation mixing with multi-die and COB LED arrays.
This technique can also give a constant beam angle using the same 60mm reflector form factor, with whichever LED array size is used, or can give different beam angles with the same 60mm reflector form factor, using the same LED array size.
In this way, very versatile and modular lighting systems can be produced.
The novel POL optical integrator design approach also allows simple modular lighting products to be developed.
Components snap-fit together to produce a modular assembly Allows point of assembly or point of installation customisation Range of beam angles and system powers made from same base parts – same reflector, light engine format and adaptor.
The only component that has to be changed to produce different beam angles and beam shapes is the integrator-converter.
