Prawn Connery
Well-Known Member
We've got one in the shop. Have you even seen a Fluence? Spiderfarmer also uses silicone. There are plenty of silicone conformal coatings designed specifically for LED applications and Cree, Samsung and others list them in their chemical compatibility charts.Any proof that indeed Fluence and/or others use silicone conformal coatings ?
I had the impression that professionals opt always for the parylene conformal
coating (applied by chemical vapour deposition).
Furthermore ,in order for the silicone resin
to be an effective conformal coating ,
it has to form a film which is at least 40-50 times thicker than the effective
thickness of the acrylic conformal coating .As it becomes quite obvious ,
silicone conformal coatings absorb much more light from the source,thus
the output power losses are far larger than other coatings like acrylic or parylene.
That fact alone would rule out silicone as a conformal coating for
LED horticultural lighting ,where high efficiency is an attribute so much sought after in the art and trade ...
Also, do you know much about parylene application? For example, do you know how large the average coating chamber is and do you understand this limitation in relation to mass production? Do you know how expensive it is and how much it would add to the cost of, say, a 4' strip (Fluence) or medium-sized LED board (Spiderfarmer)?
Finally, photon losses are a product of material density and transparency as well as thickness, so it is not just a matter of coating thickness.
It sounds to me like you've never actually done any conformal coating. But you do need to do a bit more reading