Liquid Cooling of Bright LEDs for Automotive Applications

TL;DR

This paper investigates an active liquid cooling system for high-brightness GaN-based LEDs used in automotive headlights, focusing on thermal design, system configurations, and optimization to improve performance.

Contribution

It introduces an active liquid cooling solution for automotive LED headlights and compares it with air and passive cooling methods, optimizing the system for better thermal management.

Findings

Active liquid cooling outperforms air and passive cooling methods.

Optimized cooling configurations achieve improved thermal performance.

Thermal design from device to system level enhances LED reliability.

Abstract

With the advances in the technology of materials based on GaN, high brightness white light emitting diodes (LEDs) have flourished over the past few years and have shown to be very promising in many new illumination applications such as outdoor illumination, task and decorative lighting as well as aircraft and automobile illuminations. The objective of this paper is to investigate an active liquid cooling solution of such LEDs in an application of automotive headlights. The thermal design from device to board to system level has been carried out in this research. Air cooling and passive liquid cooling methods are investigated and excluded as unsuitable, and therefore an active liquid cooling solution is selected. Several configurations of the active liquid cooling system are studied and optimisation work has been carried out to find an optimum thermal performance.