COMPOUNDS | THERMALLY CONDUCTIVE
Above: Hexagro’s LED heat sinks are moulded in Lati’s Laticon- ther 62 GR/50 graphite-filled PA6 by Protool Plastics
performed using Moldex3D and its software database. Graphite orientation checks and thermal simulations are re-run using Ex-Stream from Digimat, according to Michael Hadfield, Group Managing and Sales Director of The Advanced Plastics Group, which acquired The Protool Plastics Group in 2022. “All simulation and co-design activities are
offered for free to customers in order to reduce time to market, limit failure risks and protect customer’s financial investment,” says Hadfield. Lati and The Protool Plastics Group employed the analysis service in an LED lighting project for Whitcroft Lighting, one of the UK’s largest manufac- turers of lighting for commercial, industrial, healthcare and residential applications. It wanted to improve heat dissipation in the development of the Mirage 3 range of LED luminaires, where light levels of up to 4,000 lumens were to be generated. Replacing aluminum as the heat sink material with
a conductive polymer promised greater design freedom, lighter weight and lower cost. “Despite the fact that aluminum has a thermal conductivity some twenty times greater, if the lighting assembly is to be used in ambient condi- tions where there is no significant airflow, then a heat sink [made from thermally conductive mate- rial] can be effective in ensuring the interface temperature remains below the desired limit,” says Hadfield. Lati’s thermally conductive compound Laticon- ther 62 GR/50, which is based on a PA6 polymer compounded with graphite flakes and provides a thermal conductivity of over 10 W/m·K, was selected for the project. Lati and The Protool Plastics Group also collabo-
rated on a project with Hexagro, an Italy-based urban product-service platform that designs aeroponic gardens for interior commercial spaces, that wanted to redevelop a critical part for its Living Farming Tree product. It required a heat sink for an LED light source that would be housed in a 3D printed node containing the LED PCB, lens support and electronics housing. The source has to provide the right lighting and heating conditions to maintain the plant products. Lati and Protool Plastics Group entered the boundary conditions for the 3D node joint + lamp, which is connected to the ‘plug & play’ design of the farming trays, into software employed in its analysis service. The companies’ analysis found that Lati’s Laticonther 62 GR/50 material (a PA6-based 50% graphite compound providing thermal conductivity of 12 W/m·K in-plane and 2 W/m·K through-plane and with an emissivity of 0.87 and a
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IMAGE: LATI
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