Prognostication of LED remaining useful life and color stability in the presence of contamination

The reliability of LED products may be affected by both luminous flux drop and color shift. Previous research on the topic focuses on either luminous maintenance or color shift. However, luminous flux degradation usually takes very long time to observe in LEDs under normal operating conditions. In this paper, the impact of a VOC (volatile organic compound) contaminated luminous flux and color stability are examined. As a result, both luminous degradation and color shift had been recorded in a short time. Test samples are white, phosphor-converted, high-power LED packages. Absolute radiant flux is measured with integrating sphere system to calculate the luminous flux. Luminous flux degradation and color shift distance were plotted versus aging time to show the degradation pattern. A prognostic health management (PHM) method based on the state variables and state estimator have been proposed in this paper. In this PHM framework, unscented kalman filter (UKF) was deployed as the carrier of all states. During the estimation process, third order dynamic transfer function was used to implement the PHM framework. Both of the luminous flux and color shift distance have been used as the state variable with the same PHM framework to exam the robustness of the method. Predicted remaining useful life is calculated at every measurement point to compare with the tested remaining useful life. The result shows that state estimator can be used as the method for the PHM of LED degradation with respect to both luminous flux and color shift distance. The prediction of remaining useful life of LED package, made by the states estimator and data driven approach, falls in the acceptable error-bounds (200%) after a short training of the estimator.