Flicker-Free Electrolytic Capacitor-Less Universal Input Offline LED Driver With PFC

Recent developments in improving lighting efficiency and cost reduction of LEDs have made them suitable alternatives to the current lighting systems. In this paper, a novel offline structure is proposed to drive LEDs. The proposed circuit has a high-input power factor, high efficiency, a long lifetime, and it produces no flicker. To increase the lifetime of the converter, the proposed circuit does not include any electrolytic capacitors in the power stage. The proposed circuit consists of a transition mode flyback converter in order to improve power factor. Additionally, a buck converter is added to the third winding of the flyback transformer in order to create two parallel paths for the electrical power to feed the output load. DC power reaches the load through one stage (flyback) and ac power reaches the load through two stages of conversion (flyback + buck). Therefore, in the proposed one-and-a-half stage circuit, the efficiency is improved compared to a regular two-stage circuit. Although the proposed structure has some output current ripple, it is low enough (less than 8%) that the structure can be rendered flicker free, as shall be discussed. Principles of operation and design equations are presented as well as experimental results for a 700 mA/20 W universal input prototype.