The increasing power and colour ranges of LEDs has led to their extended use in many outdoor lighting, signalling and indicating applications – from swimming pools to motor vehicles. This has highlighted the twin problems of heat dissipation and clarity within a protected housing. Now Intertronics are able to offer a Silicone Solution. The company's range of silicone elastomers from sales partner ACC Silicones includes optically clear encapsulants, a range of gels and rubbers with differing cure cycles and physical properties. Together with harder silicone elastomers they can offer a product for most LED potting applications which require non-yellowing optical clarity. In particular they can offer refractive index from 1.40 to 1.49, with an exciting new product now available at 1.53.
The range also includes thermally conductive compounds, which are good at dissipating unwanted heat away from the diode to a suitable heat sink. This is essential for optimal performance and can easily be achieved by a product such as ACC Q-Sil 533 which has been proven to offer an exceptional balance of heat conductivity while retaining a low modulus and hardness, thus reducing stresses during thermal cycles.
Optics and packaging are playing an increasingly important role in the design of LED-based products. The ACC range encompasses not just optically clear and heat dissipating materials, but also a wide selection of encapsulants for general environmental protection in a variety of colours, hardness and thermal conductivity to suit specific situations.