A novel lens for LED airport runway centerline lamp

Abstract

Rapid and extensive changes in airport lighting have been made within several years. The necessity for providing elevated light intensity runway under low visibility conditions, which has been written into airport construction standard. Intensity distribution is a key parameter for aircraft illumination system. Generally, different aircraft taxilane conditions have different standards calling for intensity distribution requirements. In the past, there are several kinds of traditional airport runway centerline lamps in order to meet the different requirements of intensity distribution. Now most of the available LED lamps are lambertian source which can not generate the desired light intensity distribution shapes. Therefore, we have designed a type of new lens for LED airport runway centerline lamps to meet a variety of intensity distribution requirements under all the actual operation conditions. According the analysis of airport taxi-lane illumination needs and non-imaging optics, we made a this new lens which can change the intensity distribution from lambertian distribution to airport required intensity distributions. Considering our available conditions, we only can do optical simulations to verify the performance of new LED taxi-lane lamps. Through simulation results, we find the light intensity distribution of LED airport runway centerline lamps will meet the distribution requirements both in horizontal direction and in vertical direction for all aircraft taxilane illumination environments, and the energy utilization efficiency is also higher than before.