Polyethersulfone wick and metal wick based loop heat pipe for LED street light thermal management

Abstract

The challenge of dissipating heat from light-emitting diode (LED) poses a limitation on LED's application. Loop heat pipe (LHP) is an efficient heat transfer device that is used in the thermal management of electronic components. Therefore, in this article, an LED with an LHP as the heat dissipation solution was designed and investigated for the replacement of halogen street lights without changing other accessories of the existing street lights. The prototypes with sintered nickel wick and polyethersulfone (PES) wick were studied at the tilt angle from 0° to 12° and the ambient temperatures from 16 °C to 50 °C. In addition, five prototypes were tested for 50 days to verify the stability of the PES wick. The solution could solute the heat dissipation problem of the LED in a limited space and inclination. From the results, the PES wick showed a better performance. When the power was 110 W and the angle was 12°, the temperature of the light source could be below 62 °C and the thermal resistance could be below 0.37 °C/W. The results demonstrate that the ability of the prototype with PES wick can well solute the heat dispassion problem of the LED.