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Today's car designers ask for compact and light-weighted headlamps with several new functional features and special stylistic elements. This yields in new lighting technology such as modern free form and ellipsoid module reflectors with small dimensions and the need to use highly sophisticated materials. Both of this is sensitive to the amount of temperature and at a critical level may cause irreversible damage. Therefore, it is necessary to predict temperature loads at an early development stage in order to ensure new headlamp concepts and to shorten development time. An approach to calculate and analyze temperatures in headlamps by continuum fluid dynamic methods (CFD) is presented which can be compared and correlated to measurements carried out with infrared thermography and demonstrates the benefit of this method.

The calculation of temperature loads in headlamp systems is an important as well as complex field of development for several reasons: Today's car designers ask for compact and light-weighted headlamps with special stylistic elements such as clear outer lenses. This yields in modern free form reflectors with small dimensions and the need for plastic lens usage. Both of this is sensitive to the amount of temperature and at a critical level may cause irreversible damage therefore. It is necessary to predict temperature loads in order to shorten development time and reduce costs. For this application several powerful software tools are employed to calculate and analyze temperatures in headlamp systems which are presented exemplary as an overview. The results can be compared and correlated to measurements carried out with thermal cameras and demonstrate the benefit of these methods.