Category Archives: LED

Free Engineering Design Webinar: Demystifying LED Design for Everyday Applications with Concurrent CFD, July 28th, 2PM EST

Posted on July 19, 2010 by | Leave a comment

Our friends over at Mentor Graphics are running a free webinar on July 28th at 2PM EST entitled, “Demystifying LED Design for Everyday Applications with Concurrent CFD”. Dr. John Perry is involved and many of you will remember him from Flomerics.

CFD for LED design workshop topics include:

  • How concurrent CFD can help you make thermal design decisions
  • How to choose the best materials for both manufacture and cost
  • How to quickly build several design study cases and to find the optimum design
  • To quickly obtain analysis results both graphically and numerically
  • How to share the results with Microsoft Excel and Word

Sound like it’ll be great!  You can register by clicking over to Mentor Graphics here: “Demystifying LED Design for Everyday Applications with Concurrent CFD“

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Posted in CFD, LED

Thermal Management Case Study: ATS and Lemnis lighting partner to increases LED light performance by 15%

Posted on July 19, 2010 by | Leave a comment

Back in January of 2010, ATS partnered with LED lighting expert Lemnis Lighting for the express purpose of extending LED lighting into the 60W range. And that’s exactly what was achieved.

ATS has developed a practical heat sink solution for the new 6W Pharox III bulb, which is intended to replace a standard 60W incandescent bulb. The innovation increases LED light performance by 15%, placing a feasible alternative for the 75W bulb within reach.

Ruud Koornstra, Lemnis Lighting, noted that

We are very pleased to partner with Advanced Thermal Solutions, a company with vast expertise in thermal management design and manufacturing. ATS already has a range of products specifically for LED cooling. They understand the heat-related challenges presented by LEDs, as well as the cost and performance demands of the consumer marketplace.

Contact ATS to see how you can partner with ATS for  your LED Lighting Solutions. Call us at 781-769-2800 or drop us your request via email to, sales.hq@qats.com

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Posted in Case Studies, LED

The Seven Factors Affecting LED Operating Temperature and Thermal Design

Posted on July 14, 2010 by | Leave a comment

At ATS we’ve done a good deal of basic thermal analysis and thermal design for LED lighting. While the “bulb” of an LED light is generally cool, the electronics to drive that light, behind the LED, are quite hot. Our engineers have identified seven factors that affect LED operating temperature. Engineers developing heatsinks or other thermal management solutions need to consider these:

  1. Input Drive Current
  2. Binning Variations in forward voltage
  3. Steady state, pulsed or conditioned light output
  4. Operating ambient conditions
  5. The degree of solar irradiation
  6. Thermal path (that is, thermal resistance) from the LED junction to ambient
  7. Wattage Output of the LED(s) per dissipating surface area

All of these are key factors that engineers should consider when developing an LED lamp or LED light display thermal management solution.

For more information on how to design a solid cooling solution for LED, our readers are invited to our LED thermal management webinar being held on September 23rd, 2PM. Click to the following link to register, “LED Thermal Management in Commercial and Consumer Lighting Applications“.

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Posted in LED

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QLED software simulation tool shines a light on developing LED thermal management solutions

Posted on July 1, 2010 by | Leave a comment

While all our team here at Advanced Thermal Solutions are proud of the thermal design work we do here (and we have happy customers to back that up – see bottom of this page for some of them), thermal engineering is a pretty big space for an engineering niche. So we like to point out useful things we find along the way. Some of them we’ve tried and some we haven’t but the QLED LED Thermal Simulation Software Tool looks like one we’ll be putting on our list.

QLED Thermal Simulation Tool was developed by Future Electronics Lighting Solutions and Qfinsoft. Here’s the quick breakdown of what it does:

Developed in conjunction with Qfinsoft, QLED reduces LED application design cycles, development costs and time to market by eliminating the traditional trial-and-error approach to thermal design. The software guides users through step-by-step design wizards to select, place and simulate power LEDs mounted on FR-4 boards or MCPCBs. It also calculates the expected luminous flux produced by the LED and allows users to seamlessly integrate thermal vias, heat sinks and fans to generate the most accurate transient or steady state thermal simulations.

This sounds like a useful tool. We use CFD everyday here in our lab at ATS, (we happen like Blue Ridge Numeric’s CF Design) so we know the value of good, simulation software to reduce the design time of a thermal management solution. Seeing a tool like QLED sounds to us like a great addition to a standard CFD tool pack.

You can find a copy for your self and details at QFINSOFT’s QLED PAGE.

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Posted in LED, Simulation

LED Thermal Management Design: How to decide when it’s worth paying for the lower thermal impedance of an LED’s MCPCB’s dielectric?

Posted on July 1, 2010 by | Leave a comment

EDN has a nice article write up on how to decide when it’s worth paying for the lower thermal impedance? Margery Conner, who covers LEDs, solid-state lighting, alternate energy sources, and sensors on her beat, notes the following in her trailer lead-in:

The thermal characteristics of the metal-clad pc-board (MCPCB) in LED lighting is becoming increasingly important. Back when LED packages had fairly poor thermal impedance numbers, the thermal characteristics of the MCPCB weren’t so important. But today’s packaged LEDs have increasingly good (low) thermal impedance numbers, and as the package’s thermal impedance drops, the thermal impedance of the MCPCB’s dielectric plays a bigger role.

The answer? Well according to Berquist’s Steve Taylor, quoted in EDN’s article, is to “making a quick calculation to determine the LED package’s normalized thermal impedance”. But that’s just the start. Go have a read for yourself to read the rest, it’s a great take and solution on good design for LED thermal management; Here’s the link, “Normalize LED package thermal impedance for optimum thermal design“

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Posted in LED

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