Improving the Dimming Performance of Low-Power Single-Stage AC-DC HBLED Drivers

The design of efficient single-stage high-brightness light-emitting diodes (HBLEDs) ac-dc drivers with power factor correction (PFC) in low-power applications is addressed in this paper. The PFC is achieved by using a switching converter with both step-up and step-down voltage capability. It is well known that a good tracking of the input reference current close to the zero crossing is challenging, in particular when the LED output current is low, hence jeopardizing the power quality at low power levels. A solution is proposed to improve the power quality in ac-dc LED drivers under inner current loop based on a variable hysteresis modulation scheme. An adaptive hysteresis window modulated by the input voltage and the output LED current reference is used. The double modulation strategy helps to avoid the distortion near the zero crossings of the input current and to improve the dimming performance of the HBLEDs. This results in a low value of total harmonic distortion (THD) under low current/power conditions and therefore in a very good dimming performance in single-stage ac-dc HBLEDs drivers with PFC. The operation principle of the proposed technique is presented and numerical simulations are shown to demonstrate its functionality. A laboratory prototype is designed and tested to verify its feasibility obtaining a significant improvement in terms of power quality. Under universal input voltage operation, good efficiency and low THD can be achieved even for low power levels.