Luminaire Digital Design Flow with Multi-Domain Digital Twins of LEDs

Abstract

At present, when designing a Light Emitting Diode (LED) luminaire, different strategies of development are followed depending on the size of the company. Since on LED datasheets there is only limited information provided, companies designing LED luminaires spend a lot of effort gathering the required input of LED details to be able to design reliable products. Small and medium size enterprises (SMEs) do not have the bandwidth to gather such input and solely rely on empirical approaches leading to approximated luminaire designs, while larger companies use advanced hardware and software tools to characterize parts, design versions, and finally optimize all design steps. In both cases, considerable time and money is spent on prototyping, sampling, and laboratory testing. Digitalization of the complete product development (also known as Industry 4.0 approach) at all integration levels of the solid state lighting (SSL) supply chain would provide the remedy for these pains. The Delphi4LED European project aimed at developing multi-domain compact models of LED (for a consistent, combined description of electronic, thermal, and optical properties of LEDs) as digital twins of the physical products to support virtual prototyping during the design of luminaires. This paper provides an overview of the Delphi4LED approach aimed at supporting new, completely digital workflows both for SMEs and larger companies (Majors) along with some comparison with the traditional luminaire design. Two demonstration experiments are described: One to show the achievable benefits of the approach and another one to demonstrate the ease of use and ability to be accommodated in a larger scale product design for assessing design choices like e.g., number and type of LEDs versus electrical/thermal conditions and constraints, in a tool agnostic manner.