《Thermal Behavior of Bulb and LED based Automotive Rear Lamps - Technical Paper》.pdf

Thermal Behavior of Bulb and LED based Automotive Rear Lamps Antonio Filipuzzi, Orlando Cotula, Andrea Pipino Centro Ricerche Plast-optica, Amaro, Italy Fabio Zanoletti EnginSoft S.p.A., Bergamo, Italy Sara Paroni Automotive Lighting Rear Lamps Italia S.p.A., Tolmezzo, Italy ABSTRACT An ad hoc procedure based on Computational Fluid Dynamics algorithms has been developed in order to evaluate the thermal behavior of automotive rear lamps, and to improve their concept and design. A thermal analysis was performed with the commercial computational fluid dynamics package ANSYS CFX, version 11. The steady-state analysis accounts for natural convection flow and radiation within the entire fluid domain. Conduction is taken into account within all the rear lamp components (lens, bulbs, …) and radiation is modeled by a ray-tracing approach, solved with a Monte-Carlo scheme. In this work the results for a complete rear lamp with halogen bulbs is reported. Moreover, the case of innovative LED-based lighting functions is also studied. 1. INTRODUCTION Nowadays design and technological requirements for automotive lamps have become more and more stringent. The combination of design and technological requirements lead to complex geometry and space reduction for lighting function, given this, thermal simulation becomes an important step for the lamp design in order to evaluate the possible criticalities due to an excessive heating of the lamp components [1, 2]. In many cases, the distance between lighting sources and plastic optical components are very short, with possible formation of hot spots which, if not controlled, can lead to degradation of plastic material. Thermal simulation coupled to mechanical design give indication for correct choices of geometries and materials. 2. PHYSICAL MODELS The heat tr