Experimental and Numerical Investigation of a Microjet-Based Cooling System for High Power LEDs

Abstract

The optical extraction efficiency and reliability of light emitting diodes (LEDs) relies heavily on successful thermal management due to their inherit dependence on the low junction temperature of LED chips. In this paper, a microjet-based cooling system is proposed for the thermal management of high power LEDs. Experimental and numerical investigations on such an active cooling system were conducted. Thermocouples were packaged with LED chips to conduct an online measurement of the temperature and evaluate the cooling performance of the proposed system. The experimental results demonstrate that the microjet-based cooling system has good cooling performance. For a 2 × 2 LED chip array, when the input power is 5.6 W and the environmental temperature is 28°C, the temperature of the 2 × 2 LED chip array reaches 72°C within 2 minutes and continues to increase sharply if no active cooling technique is applied. By using the proposed cooling system to cool the LEDs, however, the maximum LED temperature measured by thermocouples will remain stable at about 36.7°C, when the flow rate of the micropump is 9.7 mL/s. With consideration of the experimental difficulty, a numerical investigation was conducted on flow and temperature distribution in the microjet device. The feasibility of the numerical model was proven by comparison with experimental results. The numerical results showed that at a flow rate of 3.2 mL/s, the heat transfer coefficient of the impinging jets in the proposed system was about 5523 W/m2·K, and the pressure drop in the microjet device was about 1368 Pa.