Experimental and numerical investigations on thermal management of automotive rear lighting system

Abstract

A recent survey from the Transportation Research and Injury Prevention Programme of the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi states that the Road Traffic Injuries (RTI) are the 8th leading cause of death in India and the rear-end crash of passenger vehicles is the most accounted cause of vehicle crash (more than 21 %) compared among all other vehicle crashes. Rear-end collisions (including collisions with parked vehicles) are high on all types of highways. Rear light malfunctions or failure is often the cause for such accidents. There is a pressing need for design and optimization of an automotive rear lighting system to increase the road safety. Thermal simulation in automotive lamps design offers many advantages: early detection of thermal stresses in materials, cost reduction by reduction in number of physical prototypes, better quality products by good understanding of thermal air flow characteristics inside the lamp and less time to market. Thermal simulation also makes it practical to evaluate a wide range of alternative designs to optimize the design and ensure its safety under many different operating scenarios. It is known fact, that the service life for the conventional incandescent light bulb is comparatively lesser than the Light Emitting Diode (LED). However, 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 stage, 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 research work concentrates on the comparison of the thermal performance and management of the lower end model of an automobile s rear lighting system with the bulb and LED version, through experimental and computational analysis (Design (CAD) software: Solidworks 2015; Pre-processing (Meshing) software: Altair Hypermesh; (CFD) Analysis and Post-processing software: ANSYS Fluent). The results obtained from the first cut analysis encourage carrying out the experimental and computational analysis of a higher end model of an automobile s rear lighting system with LED. Further, to enhance the thermal performance of the LED rear lighting system, a membrane design was proposed to reduce condensation inside the system newline