A family of high frequency AC-LED drivers based on ZCS-QRCs

Abstract

A family of dimmable AC-LED drivers fed from dc voltages, is presented in this paper based on Zero Current Switching Quasi-Resonant Converters (ZCS-QRCs). The proposed family of drivers is based on replacing the diode in conventional converter topologies (i.e. buck, boost or buck-boost) by a string of High-Brightness Light-Emitting Diodes (HB-LED). Hence, the HB-LED string will be working as the rectifier diode and the load, switching at the same frequency of the main switch. In this case, the output current, which is experimentally validated, shows a negative current peak due to the reverse-recovery effect of the HB-LEDs. In order to reduce the reverse-recovery effect on the HB-LEDs, the main switch of the proposed topologies is replaced with a full-wave resonant switch, which makes possible to reduce the di/dt during the turn-off of the HB-LED string, therefore the reverse recovery effect is eliminated. Moreover, the dimming of the HB-LEDs is done by means of changing the switching frequency of the converter, by varying the turn-off while keeping a constant turn-on time. In order to validate the analysis, the proposed topologies have been experimentally tested on a constructed prototype with an output power of 7.5 W.