Finite element analysis of a closed cooling system applied to thermal management of LED luminaires

The low-power consumption, longer lifetime, reliability, and lighting quality are some features that make the LEDs good candidates to street lighting applications. However, the success of these devices is heavily dependent of the performance of the thermal management. The high temperature affects the light extraction, reliability and the lifetime of LED lamp. This paper proposes three LED street lighting luminaires with thermal management. The first is based on natural convection. The second and thirdly presents the solution with a forced air convection into a closed cooling system. Simulations employing Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) have been done to evaluate the systems performance and to propose improvements in the airflow design. Comparisons of the experimental and simulation results are presented for validation.