MODELING AND THERMAL ANALYSIS OF HEAT SINK WITH SCALES ON FINS COOLED BY NATURAL CONVECTION

Vinay Pal

Abstract: Heat removal is often a significant endeavor in LED luminaries. A lower junction temperature of LED impacts efficiency, life, performance & reliability. This work addresses thermal performance of few popular designing approaches on Fins of heat sink and it’s correlation with junction temperature (also referred as soldering point temperature) of LEDs cooled by natural convection. A comparative thermal simulation results has been presented on basic rectangular fins, pin fins and trapezoidal scaled tapered fins using SolidWorks Thermal Simulation. It is observed that thermal mass, exposed surface area & geometric placement of fins plays a key role in deciding performance of fins and Heat Sink. A high power LED array is used as uniform heat load of 65 watt. An optimized heat sink has typical functional dependencies on material, fin structure, ambient temperature of surrounding fluid, orientation with respect to gravity, color, texture and conductivity of interface layer used between LED and heat sink.

Keywords: LED, Heat Sink, Fin design, FEA, Thermal simulation, SolidWorks, Scales on fins

DOI: https://doi.org/10.15623/ijret.2014.0306067