Temperature Loads in Headlamps 2002-01-0912

Today's car designers ask for compact and light-weighted headlamps with several new functional features and special stylistic elements. This yields in new lighting technology such as modern free form and ellipsoid module reflectors with small dimensions and the need to use highly sophisticated materials. Both of this is sensitive to the amount of temperature and at a critical level may cause irreversible damage. Therefore, it is necessary to predict temperature loads at an early development stage in order to ensure new headlamp concepts and to shorten development time. An approach to calculate and analyze temperatures in headlamps by continuum fluid dynamic methods (CFD) is presented which can be compared and correlated to measurements carried out with infrared thermography and demonstrates the benefit of this method.