CAD and CAE Integration Through Scientific Visualization Techniques for Illumination Design

Engineers tend to use different software to perform tasks such as geometry modeling, database management, numerical analysis, and visualization. This may cause decrease of productivity and loss of information during the conversion process between different data file formats. This paper presents a computer aided design (CAD) and computer aided engineering (CAE) system integration using scientific visualization tools and techniques. It deals with the development of a 3D CAD add-in for lighting analysis which uses the CAD model as 3D interface for creating a lighting scheme, processing, and visualizing 2D or 3D illuminance fields. Visualization features as color and contour mapping were developed using the visualization toolkit (VTK) toolkit. The application integrates all functionalities of the 3D CAD with tools for light sources database management, pre-processing, processing, and post-processing of illuminance fields in a single environment. This approach increases productivity and eliminates the need for different software.

Optimization of laser illumination configuration for directly driven inertial confinement fusion

Optimum laser configurations are presented to achieve high illumination uniformity with directly driven inertial confinement fusion targets.Assuming axisymmetric absorption pattern of individual laser beams,theoretical models are reviewed in terms of the number of laser beams,system imperfection,and laser beam patterns.Utilizing a self-organizing system of charged particles on a sphere,a simple numerical model is provided to give an optimal configuration for an arbitrary number of laser beams.As a result,such new configurations as“M48”and“M60”are found to show substantially higher illumination uniformity than any other existing direct drive systems.A new polar direct-drive scheme is proposed with the laser axes keeping off the target center,which can be applied to laser configurations designed for indirectly driven inertial fusion.

Ray targeting for optimizing smooth freeform surfaces for LED non-rotational illumination

We propose an effective optimization method for generating smooth freeform surfaces for light-emitting diode(LED)non-rotational illumination based on ray targeting.This method begins with a starting design and goes through two optimization steps.An initial estimate is determined using a partial differential equation(PDE)method and a variable separation mapping.In the first optimization step the merit function is developed with ray targeting to ensure the shape of the illumination pattern.The purpose of the second optimization is to further improve the optical performance by constructing the merit function with uniformity and efficiency.Smooth freeform reflective and refractive surfaces,which can produce a uniform rectangular illumination without rotational symmetry,are designed using this method.The results show that uniform rectangular illumination is achieved and that smooth freeform surfaces are obtained.With ray targeting,the design efficiency can be significantly enhanced,and excellent optical performance can be achieved.

Simple dynamic energy core equivalent rays method to design freeform surface for extended source

A simple method is proposed to design free- form surface for Lambertian extended source. In this method, it can take advantage of the designing method for point source via substituting each incident ray with a dynamically calculated equivalent ray. For each facet on the freeform surface, the equivalent ray emits from the energy weighted average-emitting-position for the corre- sponding incident beam, and redirects into the direction which is determined by a source-to-target mapping. The results of the designing examples show that the light distributions＇ uniformities can be improved by this method, e.g., even the improvement of 59% can be achieved.