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Company:	SureFire
Industry:	Lighting/ Illumination
Application:	Weapon-mounted LED flashlight
MCAD System:	Pro/ENGINEER

SureFire, maker of high-end illumination tools for the U.S. military and law enforcement officers, credits upfront CFD for a key role in the design success of the X400, the first weapon-mounted assembly to combine an LED flashlight with a red targeting laser.

At the heart of the X400 are powerful LEDs that crank out more lumens than other light sources, but also generate a great deal more heat that has to be dispersed by the light housing.

Using CFdesign software early in the design process eliminated three different design prototypes that SureFire would normally use for testing to ensure that design requirements are met. That translates into a savings of about 15 days.

Surefire believes that the ability to conduct thermal simulation upfront in the design process benefits the entire product development cycle. In addition to material evaluation, upfront thermal simulation makes it possible to see the interplay between critical elements such as housing fins and convection.

SureFire created the preliminary design for the X400 in Pro/ENGINEER, then opened it in CFdesign. A quick analysis was followed by upfront analyses on full models with most of the cosmetic features, which helped the company analyze more complex interactions.

Thermal analysis was crucial in two major aspects of X400 design: optimizing the design of housings, especially thermal isolation of the laser unit; and determining the best settings for thermal management firmware.

SureFire used CFdesign to perform various “what-if” scenarios, balancing heat dissipation with the need to minimize the size and weight of the weapon-mounted light.

To determine housing material and insulation thicknesses, SureFire ran thermal simulations showing how fast heat traveled to the laser housing. The simulations enabled SureFire to predict when the laser diode would fail based on a visualized temperature field.

CFdesign simulations also helped SureFire determine optimal settings for the thermal management firmware.

According to Deepanjan Mitra, SureFire’s thermal analysis engineer, “CFdesign has provided us with a test bed to launch new ideas and in many cases has helped us reach concrete decisions that we can develop rapidly into practical concepts.”