Beyond the modern design and illumination quality of automotive lamps, thermal management plays a crucial role and must be fulfilled in the early stages of the design process. An excessive thermal radiation from incandescent bulb can cause a severe thermal degradation of plastic parts such as housing or optical lens. Hence, to assess such impact of heat on the plastic parts, thermal analysis of a license plate lamp was investigated by a proposed technique combining computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and ray tracing mapping method. Then, the accuracy and computational cost of the method were compared with thermal results obtained by a thermal radiation model using Monte Carlo (MC) technique for calculating radiation effect coupled with CFD in heat transfer analysis. Finally, a comparison of temperature results from both techniques were validated with practical thermal measurements of license plate lamp prototype. According to the study results, the Monte Carlo method can give a more accurate thermal analysis results for a license plate lamp, whereas the two-day faster ray tracing mapping analysis can also give a similar tendency of temperature distribution on the lamp as well.
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