Natural convection immersion cooling with enhanced optical performance of light-emitting diode systems

Abstract

Electronics driven at high currents may experience local hot spots, which may cause thermal degradation or even catastrophic failures. This common problem occurs at light-emitting diode (LED) chips and it is not easily observed by end-users. Driving over 700 mA over a 1 mm2 chip is expected to generate local temperature gradients. In addition, bonding failures at manufacturing or during operation (cracks, delamination, etc.) may also lead to local hot spots. Therefore, possible hot spots over an LED chip have turned attention to direct cooling with dielectric liquids comprises the current study. Computational and experimental studies have been performed to understand the impact of conduction and alternatively convection with various dielectric fluids to abate local hot spots in a multichip LED light engine. To capture the local temperature distributions over the LED light engine with a dome in the domain especially over the LED chip; first, computational models have been built with a commercial computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software. Later, attention has been turned into experimental validation by using a multichip high brightness LED (HB LED) light engine. An optothermal evaluation has been made at single and multiphase heat transfer modes with dielectric fluids (LS5252, HFE7000, and silicone oil, etc.) to compare with a series of CFD models and experimental studies. While multiphase liquid-cooled LED system has a better cooling performance but lower optical extraction, single-phase liquid-cooled LED system has shown a reasonable thermal performance with a 15% enhancement at light extraction.