Custom Heaters and LED Lighting Assemblies Engage. Collaborate. Innovate

 Overview

One of the most important and complex elements in the design of High Power LED lighting fixtures is thermal management.

• Other light sources, such as incandescent, halogen, HID and HPS dissipate the majority of their heat through radiation.
• The thermal design process for LEDs develops a cooling system that dissipates the heat from the die first through conduction, and then through convection and radiation. If you have too high of a die or junction temperature, it greatly impacts the overall performance and life of the fixture.
• The slightest oversight in thermal design will have an extremely light color and intensity, and will greatly decrease the life of the LED. Heatron’s design and manufacturing process has found the most efficient means to remove the hazardous temperature through thermal substrates, such as Elpor® Steel Core,  Aluminum and other such materials.

Heat Sink Design

• Thermal design constraint is often customer’s housing size, shape or need to maintain certain cosmetic appearance.
• An engineered thermal solution is typically needed to achieve the best balance between the need to radiate heat and maintain cosmetics.
• Heatron is able to create the heat sink design and estimate the expected thermal performance using FEA and/or CFD computer modeling and analysis.
• Thermal modeling can minimize the number of iterations and help customers bring the product to market sooner.
• Actual performance can then be verified against modeled performance during the prototype stage.

Thermal Modeling

• Thermal modeling is one of the most important aspects of LED performance.
• Heatron’s expertise in thermal management can save customers from having problems in the field.
• Thermal modeling is done with FEA or CDF software. Heatron’s knowledge base of simulations increases the accuracy of the models and their predicted performance
• This capability saves the customer time and money

Measurement

After the heat sink/housing is designed, modeled and prototyped we verify the design by actual measurement. This is done in one of several ways:

• Thermocouple
• Actual junction temperature using VI characteristic of LED
• FLIR camera (pictured below)