Study on the thermal performance of LED luminaire using Finite Element Method

Large LED (light-emitting diodes) clusters are currently designed to replace the commonly lamps used in parks, roadways, tunnels and street lighting. But the success of these designs is heavily dependent of the high performance of the thermal management. Thermal performance affects the light extraction, reliability and the lifetime of LED lamp. This paper proposes a solution to improve thermal design of LED luminaires. This solution uses a forced air convection into a closed cooling loop. Simulations employing Finite Element Method (FEM) and Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) have been done to evaluate the system performance and to propose improvements in the airflow design. Comparisons of the experimental and simulation results are presented for validation.