Research

Laser, LED & Lamp Safety

Research projects - Laser, LED and Lamp Safety

 

In addition to our accredited services as a test house we have been carrying out research projects for more than 20 years. The findings from this work are being taken up by international standardisation as well as by ICNIRP for the amendment of the laser and broadband radiation exposure limits.  With this, on the one hand we contribute to an improvement of exposure limits and standardisation, on the other hand that investment in research projects grants us - and consequently our clients - a permanent head start in the field of testing and exposure limits of both lasers as well as of LED and lamps.


Our research work focusses on …

  • the interaction of laser radiation with biological tissue (particularly thermally induced injury of the eye and the skin)
  • the assessment of the risk of complex sources
  • the optimization of measurement procedures and
  • the simplification of the safety assessment at work


As a few research highlights, we would like to note that we

  • have fully characterized the spot size dependence of retinal thermal injury, leading to a time dependent alpha-max in the 2013 update of the exposure limits
  • provided the basis for a simplified analysis of multiple pulses for the 2013 update of the exposure limits
  • have developed a fully probabilistic risk analysis model for eye injury from space based lasers for the European Space Agency ESA
  • could show that the retinal exposure level from eye loupes for extended sources is not significantly greater than as characterised by Condition 3 of IEC 60825-1 (justifying abolishing Condition 2, greatly simplifying classification)
  • applied beam propagation to laser beams to show that the previous specification of classification “100 mm from apparent source” is illogical for extended sources where the location of the apparent source depends on the location of determination
  • provided the basis that general lighting does not need to be especially evaluated at the work place
  • derived a transformation factor from illuminance and luminance into blue light effective irradiance and radiance, and showed that for a test distance where the illuminance equals 500 lx, a white source is always in the exempt risk group of IEC 62471


The results of these research projects are published in more than 100 papers and reports – many of them are available as download.