An efficient cooling system is needed for Light Emitting Diode (LED) devices since they consume 70% of the applied power as heat. Thus, much research on cooling devices has been performed this century. However, most of the developed systems do not have high enough cooling efficiency, and are accompanied with other demerits such as noise, weight, and size problems. Therefore, an ion wind generator was suggested for use as a new cooling device in this study. The characteristics of the ion wind from the needle to parallel plate electrodes were analyzed for developing optimized cooling devices. Temperature changes induced by the ion wind were measured under various conditions for quantitative analysis. The efficient cooling performance of the ion wind was confirmed by the experimental and numerical results. Finally, optimization of the ion wind generator as a cooling device was accomplished. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.