Current State and Prospects for Development of Head Lighting for Vehicles. Part 1. Standardization and Generally Used Vehicle Headlamp Designs

Abstract

The main task of head lighting (headlights) of vehicles is to illuminate the road in front of it to ensure road safety. The design principles of vehicle headlights have remained unchanged for 50–60 years, but modern vehicles themselves differsignificantly from their counterparts half a century ago.  Modern cars are faster, have lower overall height and weight, which makes it difficult for drivers to ensure road safety at night: the driver needs to see farther in order to respond in time to changing traffic conditions, which is an indirect reason for the increase in headlight intensity. Due to the low landing, drivers are much more likely to be blinded by the headlights of passing and oncoming vehicles, which leads to traffic accidents. The distribution of the luminous intensity of headlights of vehicles (especially dipped beam headlights) has a sharp cut-off line, however, due to the high luminous intensity of the headlights and their low placement, even diffused light can cause blinding. Therefore, the requirements for the sharpness of the cut-off line of the standard headlight  distribution are becoming more stringent all the time. To meet these  requirements, modern headlight manufacturers use different approaches (the use of projection systems,LED matrices, etc.), but due to the lack of generally accepted efficiency criteria and the strong differences in vehicle design, the structures turn out to be too heavy, have low reliability and service life, and inefficient in using the energy of light source. This paper provides a brief overview of the most frequently used headlight designs and how to generate a standard European continental headlight distribution. Based on the review, the main problems of widely used head lighting designs are identified and the task is set to formulate requirements and recommendations for the design of promising types of head lighting for vehicles.