Automated design of a uniform distribution using faceted reflectors

Faceted reflectors are a ubiquitous means for providing uniform illumination in many commercial lighting products, examples being newer flashlights, department-store display lighting, and the faceted reflectors found in overhead projectors. However, the design of faceted reflectors using software has often been more limited by the tools available to design them than by the imagination of the designers. One of the keys to enabling a broader range of design options has been to allow more complex surfaces using constructive solid geometry (CSG). CSG uses Boolean operations on basic geometric primitives to define shapes to create individual facets. In this paper, we describe an improved faceted reflector design algorithm and use it to create a wide range of CSG-based reflectors. The performance of various reflectors is compared using a Monte Carte ray-trace method. (C) 2000 society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers. [S0091-3286(00)01107-7].