How hard can you drive a LuxIII?

Basically, I would like to know how hard you can drive a luxIII before you start to cause damage/degredation to the emitter. This is providing that reasonable measures are taken to ensure that there is proper heat dispersion, etc. At what bias and continual runtime does damage start to occur?

I've driven them to 1.5A, but the return isn't what you would think it would be.

lumileds only rated them at 1000 mA, as their max, about 10,000 hrs. at 700 mA, the rated is about 30,000. Optimally, you should go to 700 mA. 1000 mA is considered an upper limit, since the gain you get by going higher than that is considered small to the loss in power and lifetime.

I've driven the emitters up to 80 miles per hour and they weren't phased a bit.

Efficiency begins to drop horribly after 1A.

Jarhead Newbie drives his at 7A


a few nano-seconds at a time

You get about 30-35% more light from a LuxIII driving it at 1.5A vs. 1A

Consequently, you get about the same increase driving a well heatsinked LuxI.

Required data:

<font class="small">Code:</font><hr /><pre>
Q2J TWOK
current (mA) lux relative lux relative
130 5 0.23 6 0.23
310 10.3 0.46 12.4 0.48
620 17.5 0.79 20.5 0.79
920 22.2 1.00 26.1 1.00
1540 30.2 1.36 35 1.34

</pre><hr />

However, you're flirting with disaster at that point. The junction temp (in a room temp flashlight body) starts out at 110-115C, and only goes up. You'll hit the maximum junction temperature before too long.

I accidentally made a couple lights that drive at about 1300mA.. they have adequate heat sinking where the slug temp stays below about 130F, which feels pretty warm in the hand, but they are DD so they get below 1000mA in like 5 minutes... they are quite fun to play with when the battery is fresh though.. the 27mm reflector can punch a hole in the dark like nothin it's size.. check them out: here

I've been using them consistently since laborday.. the only thing i've noticed is the color is tinted when full blown.. seems a little cold vs warm when pushed.

Barbolight U-09 measure 3048 milliamps from a fresh set of 3x C 5,000 mah cells. that's 1amp per lux. in DD.

I'll drop this in here too, since 4sevens mentioned it:

http://www.molalla.net/~leeper/pulsepwm.jpg

Just turn up the juice until it crackles and pops a little, then back it off a hair. /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/wink.gif

Mark