HEATING CAPACITY OF POWER SEMICONDUCTOR INFRARED EMITTERS FOR MEDICAL APPLICATIONS

Abstract

Nowadays, inadvertent perioperative hypothermia is a serious problem in surgical settings. There are several methods to help maintain the patient's body temperature such as passive insolation, electrical resistance, forced air, and water circulation. This work continues to explore the use of infrared emission from semiconductors for these purposes. Radiation from a set of commercial infrared LEDs used for night photography is applied to a temperature sensor at different distances from 15 to 75 mm in 0.5 mm intervals. The mass of a polymer board with the encapsulated sensor included, is considered as the mass to be heated. The intensity of the current is constant throughout the measurement process. The irradiation duration was 120 s for each distance. The obtained temperature data was digitally processed to model the heating effect versus distance, over the target mass to be heated. The traces from the oscilloscope clearly shows a remote heating capacity from the infrared emitter. The speed of temperature increment gets reduced with the distance between the emitter and the sensor in an exponential way. Considering the minimum possible distance between a surgical patient and a lamp, and the data related to the weight of the skin, a quantity of emitters for a hypothetical heating lamp is estimated. Due to the estimated number of emitters required, we confirm that this technology would be feasible for inclusion in a remote surgical warming system to decrease heat transfer from the patient's body to the environment.