Stress on emitter with strobe function?

[DKlaser]

I was wondering if using a strobe feature on an led has any sort of excessive wear and tear on an emitter as opposed to just turning it on. To be more specific I am running a XML emitter at 3a and I am thinkng about adding a driver that has a strobe function. I am not wanting to tear it up fast or anything so I was wanting to know what you guys think....

 

[georges80]

Given many LEDs (high power) are dimmed via high frequency (~kHz rate) PWM, it would seem pretty unlikely that running strobe at a few hertz would do anything much to "wear" them out. LEDs don't have filaments, unless you apply too much current to the bond wires :)

Just make sure that the driver you plan to use when running in strobe mode ramps the current up/down without large voltage over/undershoots that could exceed the maximum pulse current specs of the LED. Any decently designed driver (especially with a PWM input) should take care of this.

cheers,
george.

 

[fyrstormer]

It's possible that the circuit could apply higher voltage to the emitter during the very beginning of each "on" phase in the strobe cycle, due to inductance in the driver circuit, but the effect would be minimal to an emitter that's already eating multiple amps. As long as you stay within the rated power for the emitter, there's no reason to expect less than the rated lifetime, and even if the lifetime were shortened somewhat, I doubt you'd be running the light on strobe for several years continuously, so you'd never notice in real life.

The most important thing is to keep the emitter cool.

 

[StarHalo]

There's less stress on the emitter when using strobe; just as cheap lights use pulse width modulation to reduce power use and extend LED life, strobe is just a slower version of that. After a constant-on LED and a 50%-on strobe LED have been left on for 1000 hours, the strobe LED has experienced only 500 hours of runtime, and has only half the "wear" of the constant-on LED.