BMW engineers say their laser headlights have big advantages over LED’s, or light-emitting diodes, and they are working to commercialize the lights.
Laser headlights use less than half the energy of LEDs, and their ligth intensity is a thousand times greater, BMW says. Moreover, a laser diode is one-hundredth the size of an LED diode, which allows designers to shrink the headlight. “We see a lot of advantages,” says Hanafi Abdul, BMW’s optical systems designer. “We can reduce power consumption and weight, and it provides our stylists more freedom to produce beautiful shapes.”
In each headlamp, three small diodes generate blue laser beams only 10 microns wide. Those beams are aimed at small mirrors, which reflect them onto a lens. Inside the lens is a yellow phosphorus, which emits an intense white light when activated buy the lasers. That light is bounced off a reflector onto the road ahead.
-autobody news, vol. 1 issue 10
