Thermal analysis and comparison of heat dissipation methods on high-power LEDs

Nowadays LEDs (Light Emitting Diodes) are widely used in many fields. As the fourth generation of lighting sources, LEDs have the advantages of long lifetime, power saving and environment-friendly. In this paper, the thermal variation characteristic of some parameters for two high-power LEDs packaging modules, such as forward voltage, luminous flux, CCT and luminous efficiency, were analyzed experimentally. Moreover, the heat dissipation results of two methods (heat sink with fins and heat pipe with fins) were compared and evaluated in numerical simulation. The experiment data and simulation results demonstrated that high junction temperature of high-power LEDs would decrease luminous efficiency and have other harmful impacts, and heat pipe with fins has better cooling capability than only heat sink. But excellent heat sink design could meet general cooling need for high-power LEDs modules below 15W.