照明系统设计分析
LightTools中可以精确地定义各种实际光源（如发光二极管、白炽灯、弧光灯、卤素灯等）的形状和发光特性，利用其照明模块(Illumination Module)可实现蒙特卡洛法(Monte Carlo)光线追迹，以便确定某个（或某几个）指定表面上的光照度、强度或亮度。对比实验表明，计算结果与实际光度测量结果精确吻合。对非人眼接收的照明系统，可以把结果转换成辐射度单位。计算结果的输出形式可以是二维线图、等高线图、灰度图、伪彩色图或三维分布图。利用LightTools已成功地设计了多种照明系统，包括投影系统、平板显示器、仪表盘照明、内窥镜照明、报警灯、汽车前灯、车厢内部照明、指示牌照明等等，从而结束了照明光学系统没有可靠的计算机辅助设计工具的历史
LightTools 6.0 delivers an even broader set of system modeling tools and further improves its unique and powerful optimization capabilities. For example, LightTools now includes a user-defined optical properties feature that provides tremendous flexibility in creating specialty optical components. This allows modeling of application-specific, proprietary elements such as specialty polarization components, grating components (with efficiency calculations), scattering surfaces (including anamorphic scatterers) and coating definitions. In addition, LightTools 6.0 allows modeled elements to be immersed in one another in multiple levels -- a capability needed for modeling the embedded phosphor and epoxy covering in an encapsulated LED, for example.
The LightTools optimization module, available in beta form in previous LightTools releases, has already proven to be a widely applicable feature that can automatically find optimal illumination design solutions, saving the designer days or even weeks of effort that might be needed to manually explore the design space. LightTools 6.0 brings the first formal release of the optimizer and expands it in several important ways. In particular, it now permits optimization of a given illumination distribution (e.g., uniform or Gaussian) while simultaneously maximizing optical power. LightTools also adds functionality for evaluating how sensitive a system is to variations in specific parameters. This can be useful for selecting variables before beginning optimization, and even enables some basic tolerance analysis computations.