Over at Electronics Weekly, Adrian Rawlinson has a nice article on the necessity of LED lighting to have good thermal design. While LED lights are cool on the surface, the electronics that drive them are hot! Heat sinks and good thermal design are a necessity.
Adrian notes, among other things that:
- LED Lights are moving into the 35W range giving them almost blinding brightness and the commensurate is hot
- LED’s are driven by electronics and that means IC’s. The basic thermal building block here is junction temperature. And that has to be managed somehow for the electronics and therefor the light to have a reasonable service life.
There’s alot more worth reading in his article, “Good Thermal Design Extends LED Lifetimes”
ATS has done quite a bit of work in this area as well, through our work with Lemnis Lighting cooling 75W LED and our being an LED partner with Digi-Key we’ve applied the basics of thermal design to LED with great success.
ATS has an article we published in QPedia on Thermal Design for LED Lighting we’d invite our readers to view, you can find it at: “Cooling High Power LED’s“