Equiangular-spiral bent lightpipes with arbitrary bent angle

Abstract

A recent study proposed the concept of a leakage-free bent lightpipe with an equiangular-spiral shape [S.-C. Chu, J.-L Chern, Opt. Lett. 30 (2005) 3006]. This paper extends the design of a leakage-free equiangular-spiral bent lightpipe with arbitrary-bend-angle and addresses in detail the mathematical formalism required to build such an equiangular-spiral bent lightpipe. Furthermore, a comparison of the proposed equiangular-spiral bent lightpipe and a conventional circular bent lightpipe is provided. Numerical verifications are discussed, and experimental explorations with different bent shapes and angles are carried out for comparison. Results show that equiangular-spiral bent lightpipes with different bent angles exhibit a theoretical 100% transmission with more than 76% efficiency when practically propagating, which is much better than conventional circular bent lightpipes. The output irradiance distributions of bent lightpipes with different bent shapes are also investigated. Crown Copyright (C) 2009 Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.