Liquid cooling of bright LEDs for automotive applications

With the advances in the technology of materials based on GaN, high brightness white light emitting diodes (LEDs) have flourished over the past few years and have shown to be very promising in many new illumination applications such as outdoor illumination, task and decorative lighting as well as aircraft and automobile illuminations. The objective of this paper is to investigate an active liquid cooling solution of such LEDs in an automotive headlights application. The thermal design from device to board to system level has been carried out in this research. Air cooling and passive liquid cooling methods were investigated and excluded as unsuitable, and therefore an active liquid cooling solution was selected. Several configurations of the active liquid cooling system were studied and optimisation work was carried out to find an optimum thermal performance.