Designing optical free-form surfaces for extended sources

LED lighting has been a strongly growing field for the last decade. The outstanding features of LED, like compactness and low operating temperature take the control of light distributions to a new level. Key for this is the development of sophisticated optical elements that distribute the light as intended. The optics design method known as tailoring relies on the point source assumption. This assumption holds as long as the optical element is large compared to the LED chip. With chip sizes of 1 mm² this is of no concern if each chip is endowed with its own optic. To increase the power of a luminaire, LED chips are arranged to form light engines that reach several cm in diameter. In order to save costs and space it is often desirable to use a single optical element for the light engine. At the same time the scale of the optics must not be increased in order to trivially keep the point source assumption valid. For such design tasks point source algorithms are of limited usefulness. New methods that take into account the extent of the light source have to be developed. We present two such extended source methods. The first method iteratively adapts the target light distribution that is fed into a points source method while the second method employs a full phase space description of the optical system.