Engineering method for predicting junction temperatures of high-power light-emitting diodes

In order to evaluate the reliability of a high-power light-emitting diode (LED) module, it is important to obtain junction temperature of high-power LED modules in various applications. However, until recently, there were no simple and effective methods to obtain the junction temperature of LEDs. In this study, an engineering method to estimate the junction temperature of typical LED packaging modules by using an analytical solution was proposed. Simple experiments were used to help determine boundary conditions for thermal modelling. Simulations for obtaining thermal resistance and junction temperature of LED packaging modules in the same boundary conditions were also carried out by commercial software COMSOL. On comparing the junction temperatures obtained by the two methods, it can be seen that the proposed model is able to estimate junction temperatures well.