SUMMARY

Technological developments in the area of high power LED light sources have enabled their utilization in general illumination applications. Along with this advancement comes the need for progressive thermal management strategies in order to ensure device performance and reliability. Minimizing an LED’s junction temperature is done by minimizing the total system’s thermal resistance. For actively cooled systems, this may essentially be achieved by simultaneously engineering the conduction through the heat sink and creating a well-designed flow pattern over suitable convective surface area. While such systems are routinely used in cooling microelectronics, their use in LED lighting systems encounter additional constraints which must be accounted for. These are typically driven by the size, shape, and building codes involved with the lighting industry, and thus influence the design of drop-in replacement LED fixtures. Employing LED systems for customary down-lighting applications may require shrouded radial fin heat sinks to increase the heat transfer while reducing the space requirement for active cooling. Most lighting is already in some form of housing, and the ability to concurrently optimize these housings for thermal and optical performance could accelerate the widespread implementation of cost-efficient, environmentally-friendly solid-state lighting. In response, this research investigated the use of conical, cylindrical, square, and pyramidal shrouds with pin/radial fin heat sink designs for the thermal management of high power LED sources. Numerical simulations using FLUENT were executed in order to account for details of the air flow and pressure drop, as well as the heat transfer and temperature distributions throughout the system. Combinations of device junction temperature and pressure drop were used to assess the performance of shrouded heat sink designs for their use in air-cooled, down-lighting LED fixtures.