CeramCool® Made-to-Measure Heat-Sink Design and Prototyping
Testing and Predicting Thermal Behavior Before Prototyping
Why would you choose higher temperatures and reduce your LED’s lifetime and efficiency when you could run your LED on its optimum temperature, assuring high lifetime and high lumen per Watt as well?
Most CeramCool heat-sink applications are customer-specific designs. To assess thermal behavior and performance before prototyping, we’ve built elaborate simulation models and tested them extensively. Consistently showing reliable correlations to practice tests, we can use these models to test and evaluate new concepts and variations of CeramCool heat-sink designs, which is done by our scientific partner Altair Engineering GmbH. (For a more detailed technical overview on how these tests are conducted, please refer to our CeramCool brochure, p.6–7, which you can download here as a PDF.)
From Sketch to Product: Test Cases and Design Examples
CeramCool Cube – the 38 x 38 x 24 mm Family
CeramCool with metallization e.g. for 1 x 4 W Acriche LED,
3 x 1 W Rebel LED and 6 x 1 W Rebel LED.
The optimized geometry of the CeramCool Cube family allows operation of a 4 W LED at a maximum temperature of 60 °C. It reduces the temperature at the hotspot by 6 °C, resulting in a significant reduction of stress on critical components. The thermal resistance of a ceramic assembly with CeramCool Rubalit® is at least 13 % better than aluminum for an identical shape – and more than 31 % better with a ceramic assembly with CeramCool Alunit®! The new heat-sink design is square in shape (38 mm x 38 mm x 24 mm) and comprises longer, thinner fins with a larger spacing. The geometry is available with layouts/circuits for typical LEDs.
CeramCool Liquid Cooling
CeramCool Liquid Cooling allows almost any needed
cooling capacity.
Where air cooling reaches its limits, liquid cooling takes over. Here, corrosion poses a major problem, but with ceramic materials, no corrosion will occur. The CeramCool heat-sink design for liquid cooling follows the same concept as for air cooling: the shortest (thermal) distance between heat source and heat drain. The CeramCool heat-sink design makes distances of only 2 mm possible between cooling medium and LED heat slug – something no other heat-sink design can achieve. Also, multilateral electrical circuits can be printed directly on the ceramic, thereby reducing thermal barriers and utilizing the durable nature of ceramics at the same time.
Retrofit Lamps and Isolation
The CeramCool GU10 LED spot has a fully ceramic construction.
Takes any LED. Simple class II construction with safe insulation.
Designs are developed in consultation with customers.
The new CeramCool GU10 LED spot works with any LED. Socket and reflector are made from a single material, a high-performance ceramic, and provides a simple class II construction with safe insulation. As the maximum temperature of a high voltage 4 W LED does not exceed 60 °C, both lifetime and light output are increased. This simplified heat-sink design not only proves to be extremely reliably, but highly economical as well because mount and reflector of the GU10 LED spots are not made out of different materials, as they usually are. With the CeramCool heat-sink design, far fewer materials are used, and the ceramic materials are exploited for their electrical insulation, good EMC, and high mechanical and chemical stability.
CeramCool In-line — for linear applications
The extruded Heat-Sink joins thermal management, mechanical structure and circuit board. Once again the difference between lamp and luminaire is melting away.
CeramCool Submounts to Improve Existing Systems
To optimize existing systems: CeramCool Submounts e.g. for
3 x 1 W Rebel and 6 x 1 W Rebel. LEDs can be mounted onto
existing units with CeramCools properties e.g. electrical
insulation and high thermal conductivity.
Ceramics can greatly improve both new and existing LED systems. Using a CeramCool Submount, the PCB between the LEDs and the metallic heat sink can be replaced with ease, reducing the total thermal resistance of the system (Rtt) considerably. This offers important advantages such as exceptional thermal conductivity while delivering perfect electrical insulation and high temperature stability. Both the CeramCool Submount and the complete CeramCool PCB are immune to corrosion, which eliminates galvanic corrosion especially outside.
High-Power and Aggressive Environments Application Concepts
Metallization of cavities.
High-power applications also gain from the features of CeramCool, and this is especially true for outdoor usage, where the excellent corrosion resistance of high-performance ceramics – including resistance to salt, acids, and lye – makes CeramCool an outstanding solution for the widest range of environments and areas. A family of round heat-sink designs is under development that will meet the demands of different power levels and combine cost efficient production with high flexibility of usage. This design will be developed into a “semi customized” product family.
CeramTec
Electronic Applications Division
Mr. Rüdiger Herrmann
CeramTec-Weg 1
D-95615 Marktredwitz
Phone: +49 9231 69-453
Fax: +49 9231 62409
r.herrmann@ceramtec.de