LED Driver Achieves Electrolytic Capacitor-Less and Flicker-Free Operation With an Energy Buffer Unit

Electrolytic capacitors are often needed to provide the high-density energy storage required by ac-powered LED drivers; however, they are also well known for their short lifespans. Eliminating electrolytic capacitors in ac-dc LED driver design has become a very important target to improve LED driver...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE transactions on power electronics 2019-07, Vol.34 (7), p.6777-6793
Main Authors: Fang, Peng, Sheng, Bo, Webb, Samuel, Zhang, Yan, Liu, Yan-Fei
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Buffer storage
Buffers
Capacitors
Circuits
Cycle-by-cycle energy buffering
electrolytic capacitor-less design
Electrolytic capacitors
Energy
Energy conversion
Energy storage
Flicker
flicker-free operation
High voltages
LED driver
Light emitting diodes
Lighting
Pins
Power factor
Power factor correction
Switches
Switching
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Summary:Electrolytic capacitors are often needed to provide the high-density energy storage required by ac-powered LED drivers; however, they are also well known for their short lifespans. Eliminating electrolytic capacitors in ac-dc LED driver design has become a very important target to improve LED driver technology. In this paper, a cycle-by-cycle energy buffering LED driver has been proposed to achieve electrolytic capacitor-less flicker-free operation. An energy buffering unit, with high-voltage film capacitors being the energy storage device, is introduced in the design to buffer the imbalanced energy in every switching cycle. The switching current can be controlled to meet high power factor correction requirement, while maintaining dc LED output current at the same time. Compared to previous electrolytic capacitor-less designs, this technology can reduce circulating power and, therefore, power conversion loss. A 15-W experimental prototype had been built and tested to verify the proposed LED driving method.
ISSN:0885-8993
1941-0107
DOI:10.1109/TPEL.2018.2876337