Lifetime prediction of LED lighting systems considering thermal coupling between LED sources and drivers

The lifetime prediction of LED lighting system is important to guide the designers to fulfill the design specifications and to benchmark the cost-competitiveness of different lighting technologies. Currently, the lifetime of LED system is usually predicted from the source part and the driver part separately, and then the thermal design is also optimized independently. In practice, the LED source and driver are usually compacted in a single fixture. The heat dissipated from LED source and driver will be coupled together and affect the heat transfer performance, which may degrade the whole system and accelerate the failure. In this paper, a new thermal model concerning the thermal coupling is proposed with Finite Element Method (FEM) simulation for parameter acquirement. The proposed model has a better estimation of the thermal stresses of key components in the LED lamps and therefore an improved lifetime prediction of the LED systems. Moreover, with a given lifetime requirements, this method can be used to guide the thermal design of the LED system. A case study of an outdoor lighting application is then demonstrated by both FEM simulations and experimental verifications in this digest.