Implementation of phosphor sedimentation to reduce thermal instability issue affecting white LED luminescence

In general, lighting application, white light emitting diode (LED) usually exposed to an extreme operating temperature of above 90°C. It is well-known that luminous efficacy and spectral characteristic of white LED are dependent on the temperature, causing thermal effects on luminous efficacy and color shift of white LED become a critical application checkpoint to be addressed by white LED manufactures. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to minimize the thermal stability issue affecting white LED luminescence during operation by introducing phosphor sedimentation process.

The LED samples were assembled and sent for centrifugation with 0, 5 and 10 revolutions per second (rps), respectively, during phosphor sedimentation process. Luminescence properties of these LED samples were then characterized at a varying temperature to investigate the effect of phosphor sedimentation on the luminescence stability of LED samples. The LED samples were also cross-sectioned and analyzed to understand the phosphor sedimentation mechanism. Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) was applied to study the temperature distribution of the non-phosphor sediment (NPS) and phosphor sediment (PS) LED during operation to validate the hypotheses based on experimental data.

Experimental results show that the luminous intensity of PS LED samples degrades less significant at high temperature. The experimental results also show that the color coordinate for PS LED samples is more stable and is less blue-shifted than NPS LED samples as the temperature increased. These are because the heat generated by phosphor particles during operation can be dissipated effectively throughout a high thermal conductivity substrate after phosphor sedimentation. Thus, the phosphor temperature of PS LED is lower than NPS LED during operation as validated with the thermal simulation.

The study of this paper is applicable as a reference for industries who intend to resolve the thermal stability of white LED during operation. The luminescence properties changes as a function of the temperature study in this paper can be used to predict the application performances of white LED accurately. Apart from that, the analysis method of temperature distribution using CFD simulations can be extended by other CFD users in the future.

Implementation of phosphor sedimentation to reduce thermal instability issue of white LED has yet to be reported on previous studies. Most literature just studied the thermal instability issue of either assembled LED or raw material, without suggesting any solution to tackle the issue.