Thermal design and simulation of automotive headlamps using white LEDs

With an urgent need for energy conservation and pollution reduction, the trend of replacing traditional incandescent or fluorescent lamps with high-power LEDs is growing more and more popular. In this research, high power white LED chips are used in automotive headlamp low beam system design. Several different cooling devices are designed for headlamp cooling, the heat dissipation performances are simulated and analysed both by the finite volume method (FVM) in FloEFD and experimental measurements. The simulation and experimental results show that nature convection cooling is not an effective method for LED headlamp cooling. Heat sink combined with heat pipes technology can greatly improve the heat dissipation performance. When the liquid filled ratio is 10%, heat pipes with evaporator length 30 mm, adiabatic section length 40 mm and condenser length 50 mm have the best cooling performance. Cooling device with heat pipes placed dispersedly makes the junction temperature lower than cooling device with heat pipes isometric placed in the same plane. The liquid filled ratio of heat pipes can influence the equivalent heat transfer coefficient significantly, and the optimal filling rate is 30% in our study. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.