Lighting & LEDs

Lighting trends over the last decade have been to adopt higher efficiency and flexible color output into existing fixtures for various applications including: general room lighting, architectural lighting, parking lots, walkways, sports venues and stage lighting.  

The LED is the current preeminent green solution that has many companies retrofitting their current product lines as well as developing new concepts to showcase the LED’s design flexibility.  LED’s also present the most difficult thermal challenge, more than incandescent, linear fluorescent, compact fluorescent (CFL), Halogen or High Intensity Discharge (HID). This is because 75-85% of the total energy run through the LED is converted into heat that needs to be conducted through a PCB and heat sink before convection to surrounding air.  The additional challenge is that LED’s need to run at much cooler temperatures than past lamp types.  

Maintaining the junction temperature near 90C is common to ensure proper illuminace output over the component life time which can be as long as 60,000 hours.  Since the LED light output degrades quickly at high temperatures the thermal challenge is new to the lighting industry but CFdesign has be helping engineers optimize natural convection heat sinks for 18 years.   

Innovative heat sink designs will result in using less material, lower cost and increasing margins on operating temperature while reducing the burden and expense of testing.  CFdesign provides engineers the flow and thermal performance insight in the early stages of product design that is crucial to introducing products to the market on time and under budget.

Your existing CAD system is leveraged as the hub for conducting multi-scenario design studies. CATIA, CoCreate, Inventor, NX, Pro/Engineer, SolidWorks, Solid Edge, SpaceClaim.

CFdesign Solves Tough Problems

• Retrofitting LED’s into current fixture designs
• Virtual UL/CSA/CE testing
• Heat sink optimization
• Air flow optimization
• LED Placement and spacing
• PCB design: metal core and thermal vias
• Selection of thermal interface materials
• LED construction: die and slug bonding
• Fan selection and placement when permitted

Customer Briefs

	SureFire, maker of high-end illumination tools for the U.S. military and law enforcement officers, credits upfront CFD for a key role in the design success of the X400, the first weapon-mounted assembly to combine an LED flashlight with a red targeting laser. Read Full Brief
	Daktronics is one of the world’s largest suppliers of electronic scoreboards, computer-programmable displays, digital billboards, and large-screen video displays and control systems. Read Full Brief