A study on cooling efficiency improvement of thin film transistor Liquid Crystal Display (TFT-LCD) modules

In recent years, LCD (Liquid Crystal Display) TVs are taking the place of CRT (Cathode Ray Tube) TVs very fast by bringing new display technologies into use. LCD module technology is divided into two main groups; the first one is CCFL (Cold Cathode Fluorescent Lamp) display which was the first type used in LCD TV, the other one is the LED (Light Emitting Diode) module which is the newest display technology comes to make slim TV design. There is a thermal challenge making slim TV design. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the thermal analysis and modeling of a 32″ TFT-LCD LED module, The performance of LCD TV is strongly dependant on thermal effects such as temperature and its distribution on LCD displays The illumination of the display was insured by 180 light emitting diodes (LEDs) located at the top and bottom edges of the modules. Hence, in order to insure good image quality in display and long service life, an adequate thermal management is necessary. For this purpose, a commercially available computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation software “FloEFD” was used to predict the temperature distribution. This thermal prediction by computational method was validated by an experimental thermal analysis by attaching 10 thermocouples on the back cover of the modules and measuring the temperatures. Also, thermal camera images of the display by FLIR Thermacam SC 2000 test device were also analyzed.