Reminds me of a colleague (also an electrical engineer) who measured the voltage across the mains with his meter on the current setting. It leapt a long way into the air. We were teasing him that he was trying to check if it was a 13A socket.... 🙂

Overdriving LEDs, more fuel for the flames.

I am still running lab tests with some surprising results. In meantime, something to ponder on.

http://www.gardasoft.com/Glossary-of-Terms/LED-Pulse-and-Strobe-controllers/Overdriving-LEDs.aspx 

Interesting paper from Cree themselves, read the summary:

https://www.cree.com/led-components/media/documents/XLampPulsedCurrent.pdf 

That was interesting reading.
I know LED's can be overdriven (I have discovered this by mistake a number of times) but I hadn't realised just how far you can push them. Hmmmm :sneaky:

Yes, and I think that you hit the nail right on the head with your comment about heatsinking.

I had a damages XHP 35 which I mounted on the copper sheet this time with a few computer CPU heatsinks on top. Flat to flat.

I ran it up at 2.1 amps which is double the max recommended, overnight. Still burning away the next morning.

My torch and lamp are overdriving by 43%, so I do feel on safe ground. Imolent must have spent a lot of time on this designing their torches.

My fancy on this is that if you push an LED far enough it will generate heat faster than it can conduct to whatever heatsink base its mounted on, and just burn out.

The thing about the quads as well is that the recommended max drive current is 50% of what is recommended for equivalent technology single die. So possibly on slightly safer ground. I would not overdrive a single die under any circumstances. If you evaluate the two experiments, I think this is a reasonable conclusion.

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