Highly effective laser rear fog lamp design

Jae Wook Lee¹, Jonghoon Yi^1*

¹Department of Automotive Lighting Convergence Engineering in Yeungnam University; Gyenogsan, Korea

*Contact email address: jhyi@yu.ac.kr

An optical design for laser rear fog lamp for vehicle, which can be effective even in a severely dense fog environment, was suggested. The lamp employs several diodes and a distance sensing sensor. The laser fog lamp consists of one fan shaped laser beam and several laser line beams. The fan shaped beam marks a bright line on the road surface across the road, perpendicular to the moving direction of the vehicle. The other laser beams marks several lines on the road in a direction parallel to the vehicle moving direction. The parallel laser lines are shaped by lenses in fast and slow axis of the diode laser. The downward angles of each parallel laser line beams from horizontal direction are adjusted by rotating prisms. Turning on or off each line beam is decided by sensing the distance to the rear vehicle. The scattered laser beam by the road surface consists of Lambertian reflection component and specular reflection component. By using several parallel line beams with different incidence angles to the road, the amount of light arriving at the eye of the driver sitting in rear vehicle can be increased much, compared with the case using a conventional laser fog lamp with single perpendicular line beam. This design can enhance the safety of drivers even in highly dense fog condition.

Keywords-laser diode;vehicle fog lamp; fog auxiliary lamp;