A novel method for designing dichroic color filter transmittance curves for lighting applications

Abstract

This paper focuses on designing dichroic filters for changing the color of light-emitting diode (LED) lamps. Dichroic filters are composed of multiple dielectric layers on a substrate. By applying a dichroic filter, some of the LED's spectral energy is reflected and some is transmitted, which changes the lamp's color. Conventional methods to obtain spectral transmittance curves have shortcomings. The design criteria for the transmittance curves are incompatible with the metrics used in lighting applications, such as correlated color temperature (CCT) and color rendering index (CRI). Thus, the color rendering performance and the optical transmission of a lighting system are not optimized. This observation leads to the development of a proposed method for designing dichroic filter transmittance curves to provide accurate color shift, high CRI, and sufficient optical transmission. The method initially uses the transmittance curve of an existing color filter that provides a roughly close color shift for the LED lamp to calculate the transmittance curve that causes an accurate color shift by polynomial approximation. Based on the approximated curve, a preliminary transmittance curve without the effect of the LED lamp's secondary optics is derived and verified in thin-film design and optical design software tools. Further, the derived preliminary transmittance curve is optimized by applying an algorithm to loop through a large amount of representative curves fluctuating near the preliminary curve. The resulting dichroic filter provides an accurate color shift (ΔCCT = -800±50K, Duv = ±0.003), high CRI (Ra and R9 >= 95), and sufficient luminous flux transmission (>= 70%).