The analysis of heat pipe cooling in high power LED lighting system

In order to study the problems of high power LED lighting system, a cooling device based on the combination of heat pipe and fan was designed. In the experiment, the LEDs array of 12 W composed of 4 LEDs is used and the room temperature is 23°C. The thermocouple temperature gauge is used to collect and record the change of the operating temperature of the LED lighting system in 30 minutes. Results show that the temperature of the substrate of LEDs reaches 40°C within 5 minutes when cooling by fins. In the condition of cooling by heat pipe, the cooling effect is little better than by fins. However, the operating temperature is only 25°C when cooling by the combination of the heat pipe and fan. The experiment demonstrates that the cooling in the LED lighting system is very important and heat pipe has excellent cooling capacity only when combination with the fan.