OPTICAL SYSTEMS DESIGN

Area Luce is a company dealing with designing and producing optical components and systems targeted for the automotive, aerospace, medical and industrial sectors.

The company was established in 2020, evolving from the previous “Optical Design Center” (O.D.C), a consulting firm which had been operating since 2010 in the design and development of optical and opto-mechanic systems and components. Our aim is that of providing both the optical design service and the manufacturing stage in order to grant our customers an all-encompassing service that moves from the concept and the evaluation of feasibility to the final product, both of single components and complex systems.

To this end, we cooperate with highly-qualified partners and supply companies. Together with them, we can ensure a full control over the production chain.

We offer support at all stages of the production chain according to customers’ specific needs starting from the concept stage, when we can evaluate the product feasibility and provide its specifications, to the various stages of product development, including designing, prototyping and production.

If our customers are able to provide for the manufacturing of the products themselves, we can grant our assistance in the design stage or we can provide them with the components they require for the assembly stage. If it is instead the design stage to be dealt with by our customers autonomously, we can offer support in both the prototyping and the production stages, and we interact with our customers to jointly evaluate the models’ feasibility, functionality and simplification opportunities.

Our activity and skills concern optical imaging and lighting.

We are committed to providing our customers with the best possible visual experience in all contexts ranging from the urban, interior or museal lighting, up to the medical applications. We can also offer the possibility to extend our visual capacity beyond the visible spectrum, to wavelength ranges that grant access to useful, sometimes vital, information for diagnostic purposes.

As well as granting the highest lighting quality in terms of uniformity, intensity, chromatic output/performance, we aim at offering the best quality in optical imaging. We strive to offer our customers the most effective imaging quality in every field it is required, ranging from camera optics, to microscopy and projection.

IMAGING OPTICS

As far as “imaging” optics are concerned, once the project targets have been defined, a preliminary paraxial construction of the optical scheme and its processing by using Zemax, follows.

The ideal optics resulting from this process has focus/focal points/focal plane and conjugate points of the final model, which makes it possible to compute/calculate its magnification.

Once the paraxial analysis is completed, we evaluate the real dimension of the object, considering off-axis aberration and providing their minimization. This optimization activity involves the modification of the power of the optical elements, splitting some of them into additional parts and modifying their positions.

NON IMAGING OPTICS

In the case of non-imaging optics, namely systems in which the main objective is represented by the radiative energy transmission, a different approach is required. In such instances, sources are carefully modelled, and radiation is analyzed in the way it interacts with the specific targets. These are firstly modelled in the mechanical CAD, then characterized and simulated in the optical CAD.

In the optimization of the system, the characteristics of the active parts are modified in order to achieve the required illuminance/luminance at the targets.

Depending on the aim of the study, the distribution of irradiance is optimized or, alternatively, the spectral composition or the total amount of energy collected/gathered and emitted/channelled in specific directions.