Passive cooling of high output LEDs in living walls

活墙是经过精心设计的垂直表面，用于支持一系列活植物，改善建筑物内的美学和空气质量，并越来越多地被建筑师和建筑业主采用。活墙需要补充照明，为植物提供充足的光线，以便生存和茁壮成长。LED通常是最适合生活墙壁的光源。LED技术正在迅速发展，每一代新的LED都能产生更多的光，增加了生活墙壁照明设计师的选择。然而，最新的LED会产生更多的热量和光线，照明系统必须经过精心设计，以确保热量能够安全地从LED本身移除，以防止过热降低LED的性能和寿命。值得注意的是，生活墙壁照明不仅要提供 系统必须为工厂维护和观看提供适当的照明，但系统本身必须符合建筑要求，并与安装地点的建筑无缝融合。Nedlaw Living Walls和圭尔夫大学计划研究冷却更高性能LED的潜在方法，重点是确定LED和相关散热材料的配置，这些配置将继续允许照明系统的被动冷却。该项目还将研究LED被动冷却在生活墙壁照明环境中的局限性，以确定是否有必要切换到主动冷却（例如水循环，风扇），因为未来几代LED继续产生越来越多的热量，但需要保持在与当前LED相似的温度。研究人员进行实验， 使用热电偶的照明模块、氦泡流可视化和红外摄像机，以及使用计算流体动力学软件模拟当前和未来的系统。这项研究的结果将为Nedlaw Living Walls提供有关当前照明系统设计中温度和传热的重要定量信息，并为规划未来几代的Living Walls照明系统提供指导，同时还确定了未来深入研究的领域。

Living walls are vertical surfaces carefully designed to support a range of living plants that improve aesthetics and air quality within buildings, and are being increasingly adopted by architects and building owners. Living walls require supplemental lighting to provide the plants with sufficient light in order to survive and thrive. LEDs are often the most appropriate light source for living walls. LED technology is improving rapidly, and each new generation of LED produces greater amounts of light, increasing the options of the living wall lighting designer. However, the latest LEDs produce more heat as well as light, and lighting systems must be carefully designed to ensure that heat will be safely removed from the LED itself to prevent overheating that reduces LED performance and life. It is important to note that living walls lighting must not only provide appropriate lighting for both plant maintenance and viewing, but the system itself must be architectural appropriate and blend seamlessly into the architecture of the installation location. Nedlaw Living Walls and the University of Guelph plan to investigate potential methods of cooling higher performance LEDs, with a focus on determining configurations of LEDs and associated heat sink materials that will continue to allow passive cooling of the lighting system. This project will also investigate the limits of passive cooling of LEDs in a living wall lighting context, to identify if there is a point at which it will be necessary to switch to active cooling (e.g. water circulation, fans) as future generations of LEDs continue to produce more and more heat, but need to be maintained at similar temperatures to current LEDs. The researchers conduct experiments on lighting modules using themocouples, helium bubble flow visualization and infrared cameras, and simulations of current and future systems using computational fluid dynamics software. The results of this research will give Nedlaw Living Walls important quantitative information about temperatures and heat transfer within current lighting system designs, and provide guidance for planning future generations of living wall lighting systems, while also identifying areas for future in-depth research.