Improving light output by micro-TiO₂ scatters in pc-WLED encapsulants

Phosphor-converted white light emitting diodes (pc-WLEDs) are used worldwide for an extensive amount of applications. The device is a complex combination of various components that introduce various technical issues: materials, electrical, chemical, thermal, and so on. All of these combined to obtain a targeted optical characteristic. While most of the pc-WLEDs are sufficient for basic illumination performance, there are still many issues to improve the pc-WLED performance. In this work, we deal with the incorporation of micron size particles of titanium oxide (TiO₂) in silicone encapsulant that contains yttrium aluminum garnet (YAG) phosphor in remote phosphor pc-WLED. Based on the light output and the scattering spatial distribution measurements of the phosphor plates, we have found that several essential performance indices, like the color uniformity, the efficiency, and the amount of phosphor for the pc-WLEDs, can be adjusted by tuning the amount of TiO₂ particles and thus be optimized. With a comprehensive model using a Monte-Carlo ray tracing process combined with the Mie scattering theory, two TiO₂ loading conditions are revealed. The first one is the sparse condition that the TiO₂ particles act as the scattering particles such as to increase the output flux to improve the efficiency of YAG. The second one is the dense condition that the TiO₂ particles act more as barrier particles such so to decrease the output flux.