Search Results

Car Designers are asking more often for headlamps that adapt well to highly inclined and low vehicle bodies or other exotic shapes e. g. of sports cars. In other cases headlamps are additionally used as stylistic elements and must therefore have a certain appearance e. g. oval shape or a clear, unprofiled cover glass. To realize a headlamp for such applications and at the same time keep it cost-effective with good light quality special headlamp systems have to be developed. Especially the normally used profiled scattering lens in front of the reflector causes complications under these circumstances. Therefore headlamp systems with complex reflector shapes have been developed whose reflectors produce an almost complete light distribution. Some different reflector concepts to realize this idea are presented in this paper and concrete examples for the application of this new technique are discussed.

In most cases of night time driving the low beam light function is used for the road illumination in front of the car. This conventional low beam function has a constant light pattern: no matter whether the driver is actually driving on a straight or curvy road, whether the road is wet or dry, always the same beam pattern is applied. Test experiences of the last years prove that a headlamp with an „adaptive light pattern” having different optimum light pattern adapted to different driving situations should give a better illumination than the conventional constant low beam pattern which can only be a compromise. In this paper an outline of the basic idea of the „adaptive light pattern” is given. Different driving situations and their corresponding optimum light pattern, basic technical concepts and the legal situation regarding homologation of such an advanced lighting system will be discussed.