LED and Thermal Management Principles
Aurora lighting has developed an advanced LED design utilizing thermal management principles. In LED lighting, it is essential that heat be transferred quickly and efficiently away from lighting elements and electronic components. This necessitates the implementation of thermal management techniques. In the production of any variety of light, excess energy is converted into heat, or in other words, lost. Although LED is much more efficient that conventional lighting at translating energy into light, a small amount of energy still ends up as heat. Because LED chips are semiconductors, and because semiconductors can be corrupted by heat, if excess heat is not cycled away from the chip, the LED lifespan is reduced. The transfer of heat ensures the long-term efficiency and reliability of the LED. Because one of the advantages of LED lighting is life-span, and because a failure to move heat away from the semiconductor negates this advantage, thermal management is essential in the design and manufacture of LED lighting.
The heat sink in Aurora’s premium LED lamp is a unibody design, allowing the efficient transfer of heat away from the chip. If the design were instead a collection of components, heat transfer from one component to the next would be degraded. This is why, for instance, the handles of your frying pans are of a different and separate material than the pan itself. If the handle and the pan were one unit, the heat from the burner would quickly move to the handle and burn you when you tried to move the pan. In thermal management, because we want heat to move and not be slowed by material changes, unibody construction is an advantage, as opposed to unibody frying pans where it would be a painful disadvantage.
The structure is also designed to optimize air-flow, with a slatted, flanged casing around critical components, further ensuring efficient heat transfer. And because this casing is thin near electrical components and grows thicker further from these components, thermodynamic behavior quickly moves heat in the casing away from electrical components – a key to efficient thermal management.
