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“
Thermoelectric coolers, or TECs, can be used to heat or cool components and/or systems with low power dissipation. This ability, along with their high reliability, make TECs a strong choice for providing precise thermal control over a heat-generating device. While there are a number of issues that can effect which TEC you choose, there is a basic approach that can help you successfully chose the right one for your application. Read our article from QPedia, “
ATS has a complete line of heatsink cooling solutions for Freescale Semiconductor’s QorIQ Platforms.  Our solutions utilize both our maxiGRIP and superGRIP technology for reliable and consistent application of pressure so that phase change interface material can effectively be used. Coupled with maxiFLOW(TM), the junction temperature in many applications can be dropped significantly over standard solutions.
Dr. Ake Malhammer at Frigus Primore has a front end Heatsink design tool call HSink that’s worth a look, the tool purports to take users “from an idea to an actual design in the smallest time possible”.