Experimental and Numerical Study on a Micro Jet Cooling Solution for High Power LEDs

An active cooling solution based on close-looped micro impinging jet is proposed for high power light emitting diodes (LEDs). In this system, a micro pump is utilized to enable the fluid circulation, impinging jet is used for heat exchange between LED chips and the present system. To check the feasibility of the present cooling system, the preliminary experiments are conducted without the intention of parameter optimization on micro jet device and other system components. The experiment results demonstrate that the present cooling system can achieve good cooling effect. For a 16.4 W input power, the surface temperature of 2 by 2 LED array is just 44.2°C after 10 min operation, much lower than 112.2°C, which is measured without any active cooling techniques at the same input power. Experimental results also show that increase in the flow rate of micro pump will greatly enhance the heat transfer efficiency, however, it will increase power consumption. Therefore, it should have a trade-off between the flow rate and the power consumption. To find a suitable numerical model for next step parameter optimization, numerical simulation on the above experiment system is also conducted in this paper. The comparison between numerical and experiment results is presented. For two by two chip array, when the input power is 4 W, the surface average temperature achieved by a steady numerical simulation is 34°C, which is close to the value of 32.8°C obtained by surface experiment test. The simulation results also demonstrate that the micro jet device in the present cooling system needs parameter optimization.