Project OptiSys: Plastic instead of glass – we collaborated with partners including KraussMaffei, Hella and Fraunhofer, to create new multi-layered lenses for LED headlights

An increasing share of of luxury segment and midsize cars use LED headlights. Because LEDs generate less heat than classic incandescent bulbs, this has created an opportunity to replace glass elements in the lenses with lighter and less expensive lenses made of translucent plastic, which meet the same optical requirements as their glass counterparts. In project OptiSys, we, as a technology leader in injection moulding simulation, collaborated with world-leading automotive industry suppliers to develop multi-layered glass-free lenses for LED headlights.

The high optical quality of the lenses is achieved using a multi-layered structure comprised of different materials, such as PMMA and PMMI. To optimize the design of this thick, multilayered free-form lens, we deployed our optimization solution VARIMOS, which is fully integrated with CADMOULD. It harnesses the speed and accuracy of CADMOULD’s simulation engine to rapidly explore different combinations of parameters in an automated fashion, and then mathematically optimize part geometry and production parameters. “In this way, the artificial intelligence integrated in VARIMOS automatically explores and learns the impact of different parameters like thickness of layers, gate locations, injection temperatures. And then it computes the optimal solution, based on what it has learned.”, explains Max Mades, our project manager in research and delelopment.