Software accelerates general lighting and display design.
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Press Release Summary:
Illumination design and analysis software, LightTools® v6.2, provides features that facilitate design of applications from LEDs to displays and luminaires. In addition to backward ray tracing capability, solution offers Backlight Pattern Optimization utility as well as support for import and interactive editing of SolidWorks® models. White light LED modeling is also supported, with ability to specify materials featuring multiple phosphor particles, size, density distributions.
Original Press Release:
LightTools 6.2 Delivers Powerful New Features for General Lighting and Display Design
January 2009-LightTools® 6.2, the premier illumination design and analysis software from Optical Research Associates (ORA®), delivers powerful new features that facilitate the design of a wide variety of applications, ranging from LEDs to displays and luminaires. The introduction of a backward ray tracing capability can dramatically reduce the time needed to design and analyze systems such as sources, luminaires, and projectors. This important capability provides a practical solution for analyzing illuminance, intensity, and color at a particular location, or in a particular direction, rather than taking unnecessary time to analyze the entire pattern. This approach saves time by tracing far fewer rays than a forward ray trace would require to reach the same level of accuracy. In addition, the new LightTools SolidWorks® Link Module can reduce design cycle time by enabling users to build 3D models in SolidWorks and import them into LightTools,where they can assign optical properties, optimize the design, and update the SolidWorks model. This capability provides full interoperability, so changes made in one program are updated in the other. LightTools 6.2 also improves modeling of white light LEDs, now widely used in lighting and displays, with the added ability to specify materials with multiple phosphor particles, along with their size and density distributions.
For luminaire designers, a new feature allows intensity data to be collected as a set of variable-width slices over a full sphere. With this approach, all collection bins in a given slice have the same size, which prevents statistical noise issues near the polar regions of the intensity distribution. In addition, data collection in this format enables far-field intensity data exchange with other lighting design software through the widely supported IES and LDT data formats. LightTools' enhanced Backlight Pattern Optimization utility also improves the design of keypads, dashboards and instrument panels. Designers can use a bitmap image of the desired illumination pattern as a merit function target during optimization, which allows portions of a light guide to be selectively illuminated.
With over 45 years of success as an industry leader, Optical Research Associates (ORA) is committed to delivering innovative solutions to the optics industry. With its CODE V® and LightTools software products, ORA is the world's leading developer of optical software. ORA is also the largest independent supplier of optical design and illumination engineering services, with more than 4,500 completed projects since the company was founded in 1963.
LightTools 6.2 will begin shipping in January 2009. For more information, please send an email to info@opticalres.com.
