P7 peak strobe power

Say I wanted to replace a xenon strobe tube with P7 or multiple P7's.
So some people say they've accidentally had the P7 running off 3x nimh without regulation and had it up at 4amps continuous with no immediate damage.

This usage would probably by like 1 brief flash every 1.5sec. Duration... I dunno, 50ms? So there's no overheating question. Those pulses would have to be 300W on that duty to match the average heat seen when running at 2.8A.

The question is all about how much instantaneous current the device can take, I mean at some point the bonding wire's gonna blow apart. Thinking back to what I know of switching diodes, I do see a problem where the dies will be subject to hot spots. In continuous use, there's enough thermal conductivity between them that they share the same temp. In a surge one could heat up faster than the thermal conduction between them and lower its Vf, thus one die takes all the current.

I have no idea if that'll happen at 5 amps or 50 amps or what.
It's kind of frustrating because SSC doesn't spec for this and even if I find out one device can take a high current on the testbench for hundreds of hours without degradation that doesn't mean all of them can, or that SSC won't arbitrarily change the pulse behavior in a later batch and not tell anyone.

Any... speculation on possible current?

Actually I'm starting to wonder about how flash duration affects long range visibility. Obviously a sudden flash of 100x the power at 1% duty is more noticeable than the continuous 1x power.

I did some looking up and the good long-range visibility strobes can be like 8 joule flashtubes. The tubes are actually supposed to be surprisingly good efficiency at turning electricity into light (which is why they modified the concept for HID lights). But the flash duration seems to be on the order of 1mS, a peak power of 8KW!

Well what I'm wondering is, is 160W for 50mS the same visibility as 8KW for 1mS? I know for sure once it gets perceivably slow then the extreme visibility is lost; one 8 joule pulse per second is only an 8W light if we stretch out the duration to 1 sec. But I wonder, is there a threshold where that effect goes away and there's no perceivable difference in say an 8J pulse over 1uS and 8J over 100uS?

Mine will handle 6 amps continuous but ymmv.

i`m interested too .....
what you gonna use to supply the pulse?
and what about tweaking the voltage :thumbsup:

Cree's bond wires handle up to 2.4A per pair (IIRC continuous). Each P7 die has a pair of wires, so I wouldn't think you'd have any problems at 10A pulse. Which would be about 40W.