Best Heat Sink Ever (could it be on a flashlight?)

[hank]

We just got several of these lights for home use -- they have this beautiful heavy chunk of finned aluminum as a heatsink.

http://store.lsgc.com/images/product/r20_120.png

Everything between the threads and the center circle covering the five LEDs (amber Luxeons or something like them) is aluminum. It's a solid handful of metal.

My immediate thought was --- who could take the standard lightbulb screw threads off the back of this thing and graft it onto something like a 6C M@g battery tube.

It'd be an awesome head for a flashlight.

Run as a 110v light it gets quite warm, not too hot to hold --- the swirly aluminum fins come off a thick block in which the LEDs rest. I don't know how it's put together inside [yet anyhow].

 

[gadget_lover]

I would think that long, curved, deep fins would work well in certain orientations but not others. The airflow depends on convection, so when it's horizontal the air, and therefore the heat, may be trapped between the fins.

If it's cheap enough it's worth playing with.

Daniel

 

[hank]

I have no idea whether they're buying these from some generic source or having them made for their particular lamps (though it's hard to imagine they're not being made in quantity overseas like most things nowadays). So a source might turn up. I posted this partly in hopes someone will recognize the heatsink and say how to find similar ones.


The fins are tapered so it looks like air would rise up along each curved surface in any orientation; the solid aluminum cylinder in which the LEDs are set has a 1/4" wall thickness around the LED face, and each fin comes out, er, 14/32" (pardon my old English ruler! I'm sure it's metric ...) at the widest part, in a plane with the LEDs. The whole thing tapers back of course, to the standard Edison thread.

I don't have an infrared thermometer (yet....) but it feels like the LEDs on this are connected well enough and the mass is enough that it'd make its own air circulation. Hmmm, I may try photographing it in some theatrical smoke at some point.

Anyhow, mostly posted this because I've always liked the "ray gun" cooling flanges, have seen them cut into M*g heads, but these things with the flowerlike 3-D curves are just pretty as well as solid. The other big multiple-LED lamps I've seen so far all have boring straight-line cooling fins.

I haven't dropped one yet. Could be the metal is as fragile as the cooling fins on an old Volkswagen air cooled engine head, of course, those were, um, possible for a novice to accidentally fracture.

I'll go put info about this particular lamp into one of the Fixed Lighting threads for the 110v info.
Leaving this one, I'm going to ask the company if they would sell a heatsink separately or have any dead lamps. They advertise at LEDMuseum, so they're smart about the people interested in this stuff, maybe they'd like some flashlight interest. Will report back if any luck.

And if someone else has a better candidate for Best Heatsink --- please keep them coming.

 

[Anglepoise]

It's good to see time and trouble taken to design a good heat sink.

In the last year on CPF, heat sinking seems to have taken a back seat in importance. Lots of reports on Seoul LED's changing color etc that is most probably heat related.