Patterned phosphor-in-glass films with efficient thermal management for high-power laser projection displays

Recently, high-performance color converters excitable by blue laser diode (LD) have been sprung up for projection display. However, thermal accumulation effect of color converters is a non-negligible problem under high-power LD irradiation. Herein, we developed a novel opto-functional composite (patterned CaAlSiN₃: Eu²⁺ phosphor-in-glass film-Y₃Al₅O₁₂: Ce³⁺ phosphor-in-glass film@Al₂O₃ plate with aluminum “heat sink”) via a thermal management methodology of combining “phosphor wheel” and “heat sink” for the lighting source of high-power laser projection display. This new composite design makes it effective to transport the generated thermal phonons away to reduce thermal ionization process, and to yield stable and high-quality white light with brightness of 4510 lm @ 43 W, luminous efficacy of 105 lm/W, correlated color temperature of 3541 K, and color rendering index of 80.0. Furthermore, the phosphor-in-glass film-converted laser projection system was also successfully designed, showing more vivid color effect than traditional LED-based projector. This work emphasizes the importance of thermal management upon high power laser irradiation, and hopefully facilitates the development of new LD-driven lighting source for high-power laser projection display.