I am working with a local company who use an LED light strip in a hot environment. The ambient temperature where the led's are is 85-90 deg C.
Currently they use a custom made strip with Cree XP-E (and now XP-E2) emitters, one every 75mm, running at 350ma. The emitters are soldered directly to a fiberglass PCB which is then fixed to an aluminium plate using conductive adhesive tape.
This solution works, they have had them in the field for a few years now and they dont have many failiures, however they are very expensive to make. I am trying to help them find a more cost effective solution for their lighting.
One thing I want to address is the cost of the Cree emitters, I think the best price we can get is about $2.00 each. For 1m of strip this is $26 just on the LED's! Once you add the cost of the PCB, the assembly, and a few suppliers markups on the way it gets very pricey. The cree's have been proven to work in the hot environment, but I am hoping I can find a cheaper emitter (possibly in conjunction with an aluminium PCB to improve thermal transfer to the heatsink) which will do the same job. I have seen it mentioned on this forum that Philips Lumileds have better heat transfer characteristics than Cree would this be a good choice for me in this application?
I have also been doing research into some 'alternative' technologies which I hope I will get the chance to explore (including heatpipes, fiber optics, and thermoelectric modules), but before I go down that track, I want to see what can be achieved with the existing arrangement. Does anyone have any thoughts or recommendations?
Currently they use a custom made strip with Cree XP-E (and now XP-E2) emitters, one every 75mm, running at 350ma. The emitters are soldered directly to a fiberglass PCB which is then fixed to an aluminium plate using conductive adhesive tape.
This solution works, they have had them in the field for a few years now and they dont have many failiures, however they are very expensive to make. I am trying to help them find a more cost effective solution for their lighting.
One thing I want to address is the cost of the Cree emitters, I think the best price we can get is about $2.00 each. For 1m of strip this is $26 just on the LED's! Once you add the cost of the PCB, the assembly, and a few suppliers markups on the way it gets very pricey. The cree's have been proven to work in the hot environment, but I am hoping I can find a cheaper emitter (possibly in conjunction with an aluminium PCB to improve thermal transfer to the heatsink) which will do the same job. I have seen it mentioned on this forum that Philips Lumileds have better heat transfer characteristics than Cree would this be a good choice for me in this application?
I have also been doing research into some 'alternative' technologies which I hope I will get the chance to explore (including heatpipes, fiber optics, and thermoelectric modules), but before I go down that track, I want to see what can be achieved with the existing arrangement. Does anyone have any thoughts or recommendations?
