Establishing Thermal Model for the Design of the High-Power LED Headlight Cooling Device

A study of the thermal performance of a novel radiator in high-power LED (light-emitting diode) headlight is presented. The thermal resistance model is built to analyze the factors which have impacts on the radiator temperature. The analyses are based on the experiment combined with computations using the CFD software ANSYS Icepak. The prediction results are validated with the experimental one. The temperature distribution of the LED module and radiator are obtained. The maximum temperature of the radiator is reduced by about 25°C compared with a certain headlight while the input power is 16 W. The effects of the number of fins, substrate spacing and fin thickness on the radiator temperature are also examined. The Results indicate that the optimum parameters are: number of fins=36, substrate spacing=3 mm and fin thickness=2.5°. Meanwhile, as the input power increases to 22 W, the maximum temperature of the chip is only 85.01 °C, therefore, the heat dissipation of headlight designed in this paper is greatly enhanced.