How Good Optics Mechanisms Can Enhance The Utility Of Emergency Lightbars

By Author: Sunil Punjabi
Total Articles: 2565
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Excellent optics plays a major role in the utility offered by emergency lightbars. These are used in critical situations where you either need bright and intense lighting to counter the darkness or attention grabbing flashes to attract the attention of other motorists. Either way, the importance of optics is immense, especially if you also want good control over the lighting output. This is why advanced manufacturers take every possible step to ensure that high quality optical elements are integrated into the equipment for maximum effect. Linear, super bright LED modules make great use of some very effective optics for off axis visibility as well as for widening of beam angle to as much as 180 degrees. Control over the beam angle is a very important aspect for emergency lighting, as you may need narrow focused spotlights for search missions, but wide beams on darker terrains.

Clear, polycarbonate outer Fresnel lenses are mostly used in emergency lightbars, especially those which use LEDs as their primary lighting elements. The lenses help in collecting and focusing the unidirectional beams from different ...
... LED elements, thereby strengthening the beam significantly and making it more penetrative. Penetrative light proves to be extremely useful in case of adverse weather conditions where visibility is greatly affected. The interesting thing about these lenses is that they are held on with screws, which means they can be easily replaced if required. There are special slide in lenses which can be used for enhancing the quality of the beam too. In fact, modern light bars with a modular construction offer this distinct advantage where any individual LED module can be accessed and opened up by just opening 4 screws. This makes service, upgrades, repair and replacement extremely easy.

Some advanced emergency lightbars also use lighthouse optics mechanism, where the light beams are pushed across as wide and as far as possible. This ensures that the emergency flashing can be perceived from a long distance, across a wide area. When you want a powerful warning signal that can be sent across even in bad weather conditions across long distances to alert other vehicles, this kind of mechanism would be ideal.

The emergency lightbars can also make use of clear or colored lenses, along with optic spreading filters. The colored filters and lenses in blue, red, amber and green help in providing a more attractive lighting pattern. Dual color LED modules are also present in some of the bigger light bars. Apart from lenses and filters, deflectors or chrome and diamond mirrors are also used for some light bars to get the maximum effect. While deflectors help in collecting the light from an array of LEDs and throwing it out in one general direction for a greater coverage, the diamond mirrors can help in widening the beam. This is why pairs of strobe light heads are seen with mirrors installed between them to get more coverage. These optical elements are ideal for use in composite headlamps as well as in tail, turn and brake lights for maximum visibility across both axes.

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