Tsung-Xian Lee

Design of a high-efficiency collection structure for daylight illumination applications

In developing a high-quality natural light illumination system (NLIS), the primary considerations include how to increase system efficiency and broaden its applications. This paper describes the conception, design, and analysis of a daylight collector that presents the combined advantages of excellent efficiency and a compact size. The collector structure consists of extendable two-channel collecting units, a planar light guide, and a central coupler to improve light collection efficiency and increase surface area. In this study, two types of daylight collectors are proposed for illumination applications with different light patterns. With these collectors, the NLIS can now provide sufficiently powerful light for indoor illumination.

Ideal luminous efficacy and color spatial uniformity of package-free LED based on a packaging phosphor-coated geometry

This paper presents the optical simulation of the luminous efficacy of radiation (LER) and color spatial uniformity (CSU) of a package-free white LED conducted to boost the LER and simultaneously improve the CSU. According to the simulation results, the main effect on the LER and CSU was the change in the geometrical ratio of phosphor coating. Regardless of the packaging size, when the ratio of the top coating to the sidewall coverage of the phosphor layer thickness was in the range from 0.9 to 1.1, the maximum LER and optimal CSU can be simultaneously obtained. Besides, effectively increasing the volume of the overall packaging dimension to be 30 times the size of the chip can enable a package-free LED to achieve 90% saturated maximum LER without affecting the CSU.

Fabrication of a hybrid optical micro-component with a thermosetting polymer and glass

This research develops a precise hybrid optical micro-component (PHOMC) that includes polymer and glass materials. Although glass offers better anti-thermal, anti-environmental, anti-scraped, anti-corrosive, and optical properties than polymer materials do, glass materials are difficult to fabricate for microstructures. This research describes the fabrication of a PHOMC, which retains the advantages of glass materials; in addition, the cost of microstructure polymers is lower than for glass. In this study, polymers with micro sine waves can change the spot light intensity from a Gaussian distribution to a line with uniform distribution. The glass base can protect the PHOMC to avoid damage from the environment. First, the sine wave was designed using optical design software to change the light profile. A precise diamond-turning technique was used to fabricate a mold with a sine-wave profile. A glass plate was used for the base of the PHOMC. During the heating process, a thermosetting polymer was formed to match the sine-wave profile, and covered the glass base. The PHOMC is 10 mm in diameter, and a sine wave with 100 μm in amplitude and 6.283 in angular frequency was obtained. The surface profile of the PHOMC was evaluated using an ultra-precise laser confocal microscope. Processing parameters, such as the forming temperature, are discussed in this paper. The PHOMC with the sine wave that was developed in this study can generate a reference straight line for use in alignment, machine vision systems, construction, and process control.

Planar light source by using side-emitting of GaN die with top and bottom reflector

Based on Monte Carlo ray tracing we present a study of GaN die with a reflective layer coated on a p-GaN surface inside the light guide as a planar light source. We simulated the lights extracted from the GaN die implanting pyramid microstructure on the top surface of sapphire or on the top surface of p-GaN. Micro pyramid array with different slanted angle from 50 to 850 is shown to effectively improve the light extraction efficiency. In addition, the pattern sapphire substrate with slanted angle of ten degrees is found to be an effective way to increase the lateral directionality than the surface texture.

Design of an ultra-thin near-eye display with geometrical waveguide and freeform optics

Due to the worldwide portable devices and illumination technology trends, researches interest in laser diodes applications are booming in recent years. One of the popular and potential LDs applications is near-eye display used in VR/AR. An ideal near-eye display needs to provide high resolution, wide FOV imagery with compact magnifying optics, and long battery life for prolonged use. However, previous studies still cannot reach high light utilization efficiency in illumination and imaging optical systems which should be raised as possible to increase wear comfort. To meet these needs, a waveguide illumination system of near-eye display is presented in this paper. We focused on proposing a high efficiency RGB LDs light engine which could reduce power consumption and increase flexibility of mechanism design by using freeform TIR reflectors instead of beam splitters. By these structures, the total system efficiency of near-eye display is successfully increased, and the improved results in efficiency and fabrication tolerance of near-eye displays are shown in this paper.

Visual ergonomic evaluations on four different designs of LED traffic signs

To investigate the legibility and visual comfort of LED traffic signs, an ergonomic experiment is performed on four custom-designed LED traffic signs, including three self-luminous ones as LED lightbox, LED backlight and regional LED backlight, and one non-self-luminous sign with external LED lighting. The four signs are hanged side-by-side and evaluated by observers through questionnaires. The signage dimension is one-sixth of the real freeway traffic signs, and the observation distance is 25 m. The luminance of three self-luminous signs is 216 cd/m2. The illuminance of external LED lighting is 400 lux on the traffic sign. The ambient illuminance is 2.8 and 6.0 lux in two rounds. The results show that self-luminous traffic signs provide superior legibility, visual comfort and user preference than the non-self-luminous one. Among the three self-luminous signs, regional LED backlight is most susceptible to the ambient illumination. LED lightbox has significantly better preference score than LED backlight under darker ambient lighting. Only LED lightbox has significantly better visual comfort than external LED lighting in the brighter environment. Based on the four LED traffic signs evaluated in this study, we suggest LED lightbox as the prior choice. Further investigations on the effect of ambient illumination and other designs of self-luminous traffic signs are in progress.

Novel remote phosphor design for laser-based white lighting application

Recently, there is an interest in the laser-based white light source for illumination and display applications. The laser-based white lights inherently have much higher luminance than the corresponding LEDs. Moreover, laser diodes are often more efficient when operating at higher current densities and are with smaller form factors, which may outperform LEDs in the future. Based on this, in this paper, we combine the design of the light guide and reflective type remote phosphor structures in order to improve the overall performance of the laser-based white light source. In addition, these well-designed white light sources will provide the more flexible architecture for designing the subsequent lighting system. With the introduction of the innovative design for the laser-based illumination system, multiple applications incorporating laser and remote phosphor elements for improving lighting efficiency and quality were obtained.

Miniaturized LED primary optics design used for short-distance color mixing

Color-tunable LED light fixtures generally change colors by controlling LEDs of multiple colors. This type of light source requires additional secondary optics and light-mixing distances to deliver color-mixing functions and perform high color uniformity. However, the color-mixing elements increase the optics size, resulting in more difficulties in making tiny lighting fixtures. Therefore, in this study, we introduce a LED primary optics design method that retains standard LED package size while featuring a color-mixing chamber. This method combines a lens having a rotational symmetry with a freeform profile and a zigzag structure by using double total internal reflection to disperse light uniformly. In contrast to a typical hemispherical lens, our design effectively lowers the weighted average color difference from 0.03 to 0.0035, and maintains optical efficiency of at least 90% without using any optical diffuser.

Nonimaging achromatic lens design for LED direct-lit backlight applications

Nowadays, light emitting diodes (LEDs) have been widely used in backlight module for display technology. Most of researches tend to improve optical performance in specific applications, such as sufficient efficiency, desired intensity distribution and high illuminance uniformity. However, most of phosphor converted white LEDs have the problem of inducing impure white light. The undesired phenomenon of yellow ring or blue ring becomes more serious through incorrect secondary optical design. In this paper, we emphasize on enhancing the spatial color and illuminance uniformity of LED direct-lit backlight using nonimaging achromatic lens design. We propose a new design method to re-distribute and uniform the ratio of blue and yellow light on the target surface. Moreover, we further apply it in direct-lit LED backlight lens design, in which the uniformity of illuminance on the out coupling surface can be as much as 83.7% and the color uniformity triangleuv) is improved to 0.0039. Therefore, the result of high color and illumination uniformity can be achieved simultaneously.

Miniaturization of remote phosphor LED packages

The concept of the remote phosphor is proven to be one of the effective solutions for improving luminous efficacy of pc-WLEDs by solving the problem of phosphor thermal and scattering loss. However, most of them need to use larger packaging design to enhance their performance. Such development is adverse to market trends, which also resulted in higher manufacturing costs and the difficulties in luminaire design. In this paper, we present the analysis of pc-WLEDs as the function of the packaging size and figure out its limitation, so that we can apply to reduce the device size but keep the luminous efficacy as high as possible.