Thermal Management For Led Bulbs: Technology Is Evolving

The quality and the reliability of the light of an LED are both temperature-dependent. This makes thermal management critical to maximise an LED’s output. Since LEDs are semiconductors, they emit a substantial amount of heat in a very small area. That’s why the most appropriate thermal management solutions should be considered to dissipate the highly concentrated waste heat.

- Deepshikha Shukla

Heat adversely affects an LED by reducing both its efficiency and its life expectancy. By reducing the junction temperature by just a few degrees, the lifetime of an LED can be increased by thousands of hours. Moreover, reducing the temperature of the LED’s surrounding environment will also lower the junction temperature and hence extend the useful life of the LED.

LED lighting is a greener lighting solution, with advantages that include lower power consumption, longer lifetime, compactness and no use of mercury. As the LED industry shifts to higher brightness LEDs and higher density LED arrays, more effective thermal management solutions are required to ensure the operating temperature of the LED junction is low. The shift in the LED light’s wavelength with a rise in temperature is an important concern for spectrum sensitive products.

High-intensity applications such as sports venues, street lamps, industrial and office lighting will lead to increasingly compact LED designs that deliver more lumens, draw more power and, consequently, have to manage heat more efficiently than ever before.

The role of thermal management in improving LED efficiency

Thermal management materials are designed to dissipate heat away from critical areas. They can be used beneath LEDs as an interface between the PCB and the outer casing, conducting the heat away, both above and below the PCB surface. The method chosen will depend upon the design of the assembly. Thermal management materials can also be used to encapsulate associated electronic circuits such as LED drivers, improving the efficiency of the LED unit as a whole. This can help distribute the heat in LED arrays to reduce the temperature at the LED junctions.