Digital Luminaire Design Using LED Digital Twins-Accuracy and Reduced Computation Time: A Delphi4LED Methodology

Light-emitting diode (LED) digital twins enable the implementation of fast digital design flows for LED-based products as the lighting industry moves towards Industry 4.0. The LED digital twin developed in the European project Delphi4LED mimics the thermal-electrical-optical behavior of a physical LED. It consists of two parts: a package-level LED compact thermal model (CTM), coupled to a chip-level multi-domain model. In this paper, the accuracy and computation time reductions achieved by using LED CTMs, compared to LED detailed thermal models, in 3D system-level models with a large number of LEDs are investigated. This is done up to luminaire-level, where all heat transfer mechanisms are accounted for, and up to 60 LEDs. First, we characterize a physical phosphor-converted white high-power LED and apply LED-level modelling to produce an LED detailed model and an LED CTM following the Delphi4LED methodology. It is shown that the steady-state junction temperature errors of the LED CTM, compared to the detailed model, are smaller than 2% on LED-level. To assess the accuracy and the reduction of computation time that can be realized in a 3D system-level model with a large number of LEDs, two use cases are considered: (1) an LED module-level model, and (2) an LED luminaire-level model. In the LED module-level model, the LED CTMs predict junction temperatures within about 6% of the LED detailed models, and reduce the calculation time by up to nearly a factor 13. In the LED luminaire-level model, the LED CTMs predict junctions temperatures within about 1% of LED detailed models and reduce the calculation time by about a factor of 4. This shows that the achievable computation time reduction depends on the complexity of the 3D model environment. Nevertheless, the results demonstrate that using LED CTMs has the potential to significantly decrease computation times in 3D system-level models with large numbers of LEDs, while maintaining junction temperature accuracy.