Heatsinking with Micropuck?

[pedalinbob]

i just got a couple of micropucks, and intend to build a couple of "Angleluxes" using 3w luxeons (waiting for the LED's to arrive).

i tested one of the micropucks last night with an old ugly-greenie star/o. it became pretty warm--verging on hot. the bats are new.

i thought that if the luxeon was driven to spec,additional heatsinking would not be required. of course, now i am concerned about mounting the luxeon in a plastic light.

i think what i will do is mount the star on an aluminum heatsink, and hopefully spread out the heat a bit.

any suggestions?

thanks,
Bob

 

[James S]

You mean the star or the micropuck got warm? I've got a micropuck that has gone through several different experiments and it doesn't ever get beyond warm, but you definitely have to sink the luxeon if you're driving at spec! I think you can run up to 100ma into one without any heat sinking, but spec of 350ma I think...

You don't need a full pentium heatsink in there. but you need something to increase the thermal mass it has to dump into. I've seen people around here build plastic lights that just had a nice piece of copper inside the star was mounted to, even though it didn't make contact with the shell or radiate into space /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/wink.gif it still provided enough. You'll definitely need something though.

 

[pedalinbob]

yes, the star was getting warm/hot.

the micropuck was only warm.

i will stuff a nice chunk of copper or aluminum in there.

thanks for the info!

Bob

Ps those micropucks are NICE! drives the luxeon very well.