Analysis of Thermal and Luminous Performance of MR-16 LED Lighting Module

Light emitting diode (LED) with a long lifetime, low power consumption, and low pollution has been successfully applied in many products. However, due to its low electro-optical conversion efficiency, high percentage of input power transformed to redundant heat, thus increasing the LED temperature. This phenomenon decreases the luminous flux, changing light color, and useful life span of LED. Therefore, thermal management becomes an important issue in high power LED. In this paper, the variation of luminous flux and light color for different LED lighting modules under long time operation has been measured and discussed. In addition, a detailed finite element model of LED lighting module, MR-16, with a corresponding input power and suitable boundary conditions is established by using the ANSYS finite element analysis program. Furthermore, to validate the simulation results, the current-voltage-temperature method for characterization of a diode is utilized to measure the junction temperature of LED chip indirectly and compare with simulation results. After the simulation is validated, various thermal performance assessments under the different design parameters of the LED package and lighting module are also investigated in this paper. The methodology and analysis results of this paper can provide a guideline for the LED lighting module such as MR-16 design in the future.