Advantages and disadvantages of high power LED
Standard LED is usually the best choice when the internal space limitation of the device is very large. As mentioned above, high-power LED requires additional cooling fins, as well as overall space cooling technology. Its primary task is to create more surface areas to be cooled by convection and radiation. Larger surface areas can more effectively help reduce heat, but also increase the volume of high-power LED. This adds to the design barrier for smaller space and smaller products.
High power LED requires thermal management, which greatly increases the cost of LED. In the design process, the most expensive additives is heat sink. The fins can be made of a variety of metallic materials, including relatively inexpensive aluminum, and materials with better conductivity but are more expensive (e.g. copper and silver). These expensive materials could lead to an increase in the cost of high-power products by 1~10 US dollars, while standard LED devices could avoid such an increase in costs.
The design process required for standard LED arrays is much simpler than that due to the need to consider greatly simplifying thermal management, and therefore relative to the design process required for high-power technologies. In our theoretical example, the 1W LED requires 350mA current, while the six standard LED arrays require only 120mA current. Large power technologies require the use of heat sinks and metal core PCB panels to ensure efficient loss, reduced service life, or fading due to excessive junction temperature.
Due to the conversion of high-power white LED efficiency is low cost, high luminous flux is small, light, easy to change color to use for a long time, which heat and other factors, so the application of high-power white LED in the short term is the main work of special lamps in some special fields, to the long-term goal is the field of general lighting.
