Modelling and numerical simulations of heat distribution for LED heat sink (Q2398537)

Summary: Light-emitting diode (LED) has higher efficiency and longer lifetime when compared with the conventional lighting. However, the efficiency and lifetime will be degraded greatly when it is operated at a high temperature. Now, both previous simulation and experimental results have already indicated that the heat transfer in vertical direction of the LED lamp by conduction is the most critical component. In this paper, a simplified numerical simulation model is built to estimate the heat distribution of the LED heat sink in the spherical coordinate system, which would be useful for its shape optimization design. With this model, some mathematical treatments are provided to a heat conduction equation, in order to rapidly compute the static heat distribution and the temperature of different designs of LED heat sinks. The built rapid heat sink evaluation method, implicit finite difference method (IFDM), is unconditionally stable. Several heat distribution simulations could demonstrate that our built mathematical model conforms well to the reality and our method is full of feasibility and effectiveness.