New LED headlight designs

[MWS]

Originally Posted by maytag

Most people don't understand that LED's generate a TON of heat. How you manage that heat is crucial to reliability.

Just to clarify (before this spins off into a tangent, lol), we are taking about source of heat. If we were to compare an incandescent to a LED, the incandescent produces a ton of IR heat (you can feel the warmth of the light) while an LED produces heat from electrical resistance and is disapated via heat sinks. Think of a processor in a computer... the chip produces no light (obviously) but churns out a ton of heat due to the resistance in the processor; same (or same-ish) thing with LEDs.

The reason people think LEDs don't produce heat (I suppose) is they think of household lighting (and incandescent vs LED bulbs)...the reason the LED doesn't seem hot is that it's consuming a lot less power. If it consumed the same as the incandescent, you could fry an egg on it.

Sorry for the interruption....lol.