Thermal investigation of high-power UV-LEDs using graphene oxide silicone encapsulant

In this paper, a new packaging structure was proposed to reduce the heat accumulation of high-power UV-LEDs using silicone encapsulant with high thermal conductivity. The simulations for the thermal behavior of the traditional and proposed structures had been performed using finite element analysis (FEA). It was obtained that the improvement of temperature distribution was obviously enhanced as the thermal conductivity of encapsulant increased to 6.0 W/(m·k). Therefore, the traditional structure and proposed structure using silicone encapsulant with 4 wt% graphene oxide (GO) as filler were fabricated and investigated by measurements. And the thermal conductivity of 4 wt% GO-embedded silicone was measured at 6.1 W/(m·K). Accordingly, the interface thermal resistance was reduced by 1.2 K/W, and the surface temperature was reduced by 1.4 °C. This approach is believed to provide a simple and effective strategy for improving the performance of UV-LEDs.