Lighting is the Hot Industry for Upfront CFD

The trend for lighting designers is to emit as much light as possible for a given input power. Various new applications are evolving everyday. There has obviously been a huge push to make things "greener". This pushes engineers to optimize their designs and maiximize efficiency. LEDs are the hottest thing right now. No pun intended.

Designers are always trying to cram these light sources into tiny little areas. This causes major issues on how to cool the devices. Most of the time, they do not have the luxury of actively cooling the lights. They have to rely on natural convection and have to be creative on the various types of heat sinks they use. This is a perfect application for Upfront CFD.

In the past, there was tons and tons of trial and error. Hand calcs and best practices only go so far. It is impossible to account for the various shapes and sizes of the heat sinks. It is much faster and cheaper to build your design in CAD, run an analysis, verify that the temps are within spec and then make a change and optimize.

A really cool article was recently published that highlights how Upfront CFD was used to ensure that gigantic lighting displays are cooled properly. The lighting displays are used in stadiums and the Las Vegas strip.

Literally seems like these lighting applications are popping up everywhere. Seems odd that lighting companies wouldn't have been the first people in line to jump on the Upfront CFD train?!?