Experimental study on fog lamp visibility: part 1 observations in real fog situations

摘要

Fog lamps are becoming more and more widely used now. We did an experiment using four types of fog lamps and two types of headlamps under various conditions of fog density to measure the distance at which obstacles and road markings can be seenat night. The result showed that it is possible to see an obstacle which is 20m ahead with conventional fog lamps when there is 50m visibility or more. However, when using headlamps, the same obstacle can be seen with 30m visibility, due to the factthat headlamps emit more light than fog lamps. These results suggest that more light produces clearer visibility in dense fog at night. We think it is possible to get better visibility in real driving situations in dense fog by using brighter headlampsor simultaneously turning on conventional headlamps and fog lamps which have a sharp cut-off.