Cooling photoluminescent phosphors in laser-excited white lighting with three-dimensional boron nitride networks.

• Luminescent composites with high-thermal-conductivity is achieved via 3D-hBN network. • The mechanism of thermal conduction enhancement is explained by numerical simulation. • Optical performance of the proposed luminescent composites is tested. • Laser-excited white lighting with excellent cooling performance is demonstrated. Laser-excited white lighting, which is achieved by laser diodes and phosphor converters, has garnered increasing interest in recent years due to their high-power and high-brightness characteristics. Nevertheless, two long-standing thermal issues remain formidable: first, the photoluminescent phosphors also generate heat due to the Stokes loss, which are the second heat source in the packaging but long ignored; second, the phosphors are embedded in low-thermal-conductivity silicone and the generated heat is rather inefficient to dissipate. As a result, the accumulated heat leads to high temperature in phosphor particles and even thermal quenching, which deteriorate the luminescence, chromaticity, and reliability. In this work, these problems are successfully addressed by establishing three-dimensional (3D) boron nitride (BN) networks to cool the silicone-embedded phosphor particles in a facile and scalable method. When lighted under the driven current of 900 mA, the working temperature of phosphor layer is dramatically decreased by 95.2 °C with the 3D-BN network without sacrificing the luminescence and chromaticity. Such strategy with excellent cooling performance, high reliability, and easy scalability may hold great promise for broader optoelectronics applications beyond laser-excited white lighting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]