When we drive on the road at night, we will meet people who drive their vehicles with bad high-beam headlights. Our heart is crashed. We can not wait to reflect a lightning to them for revenge. But before we complain about the problem with high-beam headlights, do we really understand the type and structure of them? Today, I would like to take a deep learning in them.
Reflective halogen light
We have to talk about incandescent light before saying halogen light. The principle of the incandescent light is to conduct enough current to the filament. Når filamentet er opvarmet til incandescent tilstand, vil det begynde at gløde. Men dens ulempe er den korte livstiden. So humans add halogen gas into the bulb. Sublimed tungsten filaments get chemical reaction with halogens at high temperatures. The cooled tungsten will resolidify on the tungsten filaments.
Through the reactions, it comes to a balanced cycle to avoid premature fracture or tungsten filaments. Its life-span takes longer than incandescent bulbs.
Siden lampen lyser i hele positionen, vil det forårsake et problem. That is the light can not concentrate on the road, most of light does not work on the right purpose. Også det vil ofte blinke til føreren af køretøjet. So human beings create something to surround the bulb, it’s called reflector. It can help to gather light. The front lamp does not look good if only with a reflector. So gradually, the car manufacturer added lens to make the front lamp look better. The lens improves headlight bulb in nice appearance and spotlight. But because halogen bulb is not bright enough, when putting in projector, it’s going to be dimmer than before. Halogen bulb is not suitable to work with projector. Now halogen bulbs usually still work with reflector.
HID headlight
The defect of halogen light is low brightness, so we sometimes name it candle light. For this reason, humans invented another automotive light, High intensity Discharge HID.
HID bulb is full or Inert gas mixture includes Xenon. It breaks down the xenon by high pressure to produce an arc between two electrodes and release light. There is no tungsten filament in it, so it can be used for a longer time. The lifetime of HID is 10 times longer than traditional halogen bulbs and the brightness is three times than it.
Når du bytter med HID, er forskjellen tydelig. Many car owners would like to install HID for their car. If the modification did not, it is very easy to get problems because of its high brightness. Some original cars do not have lenses on the front lamp when you install HID lamp, the original reflector can not collect the light because the lamp’s position and change have changed. At this time, the light emitted by xenon is scattered. It will glow that driver so he can ‘see the road condition clearly.
If we all know the HID headlights are usually white or even bluish. The penetration of yellow light is better than white light and blue one. Dus de penetratie van HID-licht is zwakker dan traditionele halogeenlicht in regenachtige dag. People will change golden fog headlight after installing HID headlight in order to see the road clearly in the rainy and foggy day.
LED headlight
People still did not satisfy HID headlight, so they use another light in the car — LED (Light-emitting diode). Why LED have more advantage than Halogen and HID headlight? Here are its merits as below:
- Energy conservation
LEDs are twice as efficient as fluorescent bulbs. In the car, LED energy consumption is only 1/20 of halogen lights.
- Long life
At present, the LED car headlight can last for 50000 hours when halogen lights just last for only about 3000 hours.
- Good durability
Due to the simple structure of the LED lights, the shock resistance is better and it can adapt to various environments.
- Small volume
LED components are small, so it is easy to be placed in compact space. It can meet the requirements of the lights for the manufacturers.
- Quick response
The lighting of the LED is microsecond, which can be used in the car for better response.
- Low requirement for environment
LED units can be driven by low voltage direct current and it is low load.
When we mention led headlight, your guys may remind another stuff, Audi OEM matrix LED headlight. By light up and crush out with single LED light, Audi created a dynamic turn signal light. This LED matrix headlight group can detect the traffic vehicles ahead. It will automatically adjust or close several LED monomers in the light group to keep the other party from the light influence. The LED element gives more development for the vehicle light group to make them more capacity and advanced.
Laser headlight
However, humans are still not satisfied with the current headlight technology. There is then the manufacturer created a newest headlight—laser headlight. Laser diode is the core of laser headlight. The laser headlight releases light and controls the direction of the light beam through a lens. Laser diodes have most of the advantages of LED. And the brightness is higher than LED. A single laser headlight element is smaller than LED’s, it’s 1/100 of the LED size. The benefits of laser headlights are high brightness and long illumination distance.
The use of laser headlights is supported by LED headlights. Although the irradiation distance of laser headlight is far away and bright, the range of irradiation is narrow, it needs LED headlight to supplyment the light. The world’s first mass production car used laser headlights is Audi R8 LMX. The biggest feature of this car is the use of laser headlights. BMW i8 also install laser headlights. BMW and Audi are now equipped with laser headlights on their mass production cars.
Conclusion
In fact, there are not many types of headlights, the overall rating is actually halogen headlamp, HID and LED (the laser headlamps are not popular, not mentioned here) and it is easy to distinguish them. But if it’s a HID lamp or LED lamp, some of the most basic things we have to follow, that is, civilization in the use of light. Even though your lights are really awesome, there’s no need to keep your high-beam lights at all times. It is no benefit for both us and others.