With the help of DOE funding, Eaton used manufacturing process innovation to develop a way to place the LED package, chip, or chip array directly on a fixture or heat sink in order to improve thermal management approaches and reduce manufacturing costs related to $/klm, throughput, and assembly. Non-traditional thick-film processes were used to investigate flexible manufacturing for planar, non-planar, and recessed product designs. The project was spearheaded by Eaton’s Lighting Division and Corporate Research & Technology Center in partnership with subcontractors Heraeus and HaikuTech.
The benefits of a thick-film process include increased automation, manufacturing flexibility, reduced lead time, and inventory simplification. Replacing the metal-core printed circuit board and thermal interface material with a printed circuit on the luminaire reduces the number of thermal interfaces in the system and thus improves thermal resistance while lowering manual assembly costs. In addition, an integrated driver circuit provides an optimal level of integration, facilitates full automation of electronics component assembly, and significantly reduces material costs.
Pilot-scale results included an optimized process that reduced the number of process steps by 33% and cut total process time by almost 50%. Thermal shock reliability analysis indicated that the design parameters had a significant effect on the lifetime, but accelerated life-testing was used to validate a number of configurations that are competitive with the most robust LED luminaire products. The project’s ultimate goal of a fivefold reduction in process time and a 2.5-fold reduction in the number of process steps were met, while tripling manufacturing throughput. The combined impact of material cost-out and manufacturing integration and optimization reduced the integrated light-engine cost by about a factor of 12 from point of inception. The key parameters required to commercialize the thick-film-on-aluminum technology developed in this project have been identified, and significant progress has been made in terms of optimization for high volume and lowest cost while ensuring the highest quality levels. (September 2016)
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