Thermal Management of the LED Headlamp Module for a Motorcycle

This investigation focuses on the understanding and design of heat-rejecting mechanisms inside the LED headlamp for motorcycle through a combined effort of simulation, mockup fabrication, and experimental verification. At first ARTC LED headlamp mockup, which was developed by the Automobile Research and Testing Center (ARTC) in Taiwan, was chosen to perform this thermal task. The thermal design for motorcycle LED headlamp was constrained by the motion of vehicle and the high energy dissipating density in LED emitter. After considering all possible alternatives carefully, heat sink with heat pipe was selected as the thermal dissipating mechanism. Several heat sink modules are designed and numerically verified to meet the thermal requirement of the LED module. Thereafter, this thermal module for LED headlight was fabricated via CNC machine and used to carry out both lab and on-board experiments. It is shown that the numerical results agree well with the experimental outcomes. Obviously, the LED temperatures are located at the range of 51.6~58.5 °C, which are evidently well below the safety limit. In conclusion, the accomplishment of this research offers a rigorous and systematic design scheme for the LED headlamp. This design scheme for LED motorcycle headlamps has been successfully utilized to generate and fabricate an efficient thermal module to control the LED chip temperature below 85~90 °C, which is verified both by simulation and experimental measurement. In addition, the LED thermal modules for automobile will then be undertaken by following the similar procedure.