Silicone Materials Expand LED Lighting Design

Dow Corning introduced four optical silicone materials for LED lighting applications this week at the Light+Building show in Frankfurt, Germany.

As LEDs continue to replace conventional light sources, lighting makers want to expand the variety of LED lamp and luminaire designs and speed up manufacturing. They are especially concerned with designing and manufacturing more cost-effective, efficient, and reliable products. Another major concern is designing lighting that appeals to consumers, not industrial users. One way to help in those efforts is developing materials that can be used in a wider range of designs, such as Dow Corning's optical moldable materials.

Two new moldable silicones from the company are MS-1001 and MS-3003. MS-3003 Moldable Silicone "delivers the higher thermal stability necessary to develop optical parts with remote phosphors, helping to speed processing and provide reliable optical, thermal and mechanical stability," the company said in a press release.

MS-1001 Moldable Silicone "offers the product line's highest hardness after cure to expand design flexibilities for thinner optical parts, and enable excellent reproduction of surface features possible only with silicone technology." It also has the Moldable Silicone product family's characteristic ultra-high clarity and its ability to be injection-molded in complex shapes. It is especially well suited for use in LED secondary optics like light guides and light pipes, which diffuse, focus, and distribute light. This material's photothermal stability also makes it suited to optics that are situated close to high-brightness LED dies.

The two other materials introduced at the show are a coating and a sealant. The CI-2001 White Reflective Coating helps increase the internal reflectivity and light diffusion of LED lamps and luminaires, making them more efficient. The material can be easily sprayed on to reflectors using standard equipment.

The EA-2900 Sealant is a white silicone adhesive that bonds quickly and firmly in as little as 10 minutes. It can be used to assemble optical and structural parts within LED lamps and luminaires. These characteristics let makers of LED lighting assemblies -- such as modules, lamps, and luminaires -- speed up the assembly and parts handling processes. The adhesive requires no priming to adhere securely to conventional substrates and other materials typically used in these assemblies, such as glass, polycarbonate, polymethylmethacrylate, aluminum, and Dow Corning's molded silicone optical materials. It has a UL Flammability rating of 94-V1.

Related posts: