Computational Investigation on Radiative Heat Transfer Characteristics of an Automotive LED Tail Light

A recent survey by National Transportation Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) stated that the rear-end crash of passenger vehicles is the most accounted cause of vehicle crash (more than 21%) compared among all other vehicle crashes. Tail light malfunctions or failure is often the cause for such accidents. There is a pressing need for design and optimization of an automotive tail light system to increase the road safety. The service life for the conventional incandescent light bulb is comparatively lesser than the Light Emitting Diode (LED) tail light. During the physical testing process and its validation in the later development stage, the computational methods can be effectively used for the design optimization of LED tail light system in the development based on the thermal-radiative performance. The results could be incorporated in automotive design industries to produce nearly zero defect and failure-free design with better thermal performances. Therefore, it is highly significant to simulate and study the thermal management through simulation analysis. The present study focuses on a computational analysis of a complex automotive tail light system with a near net shape using Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) methodology. The simulation results compared three different materials for housing of tail light assembly along with re-arranging the LED arrays. Among the selected housing materials, Acrylonitrile Butadiene Styrene (ABS) exhibited better thermal performance with the maximum temperature of around 365.74 K compared with other housing materials. The computational results were validated using an experimental set up and the temperature measurements followed the same trend as CFD. The maximum percentage of deviation was not more than 2.6%.