Dimming Techniques Focusing on the Improvement in Luminous Efficiency for High-Brightness LEDs

The pulse width modulation (PWM) dimming mode features good dimming linearity and has been widely used for driving high-brightness light-emitting diodes (HBLEDs), in which the brightness change is reached by modulating the duty cycle of the dimming signal to regulate the average current flowing through LEDs. However, the current-illuminance characteristic curve of most LEDs is nonlinear in nature. Namely, under the same lighting power fed, the conventional PWM dimming cannot make the LED exert its best luminous efficiency (LE) specified in datasheets. This paper focuses on the study of further improving LED luminous efficacy via dimming manipulation. Thereby, two multilevel current dimming techniques with varied dimming signal voltage and varied current sensing resistance are presented. With limited dimming capability, the proposed dimming strategies can efficiently raise the luminous flux ratio without increasing the power consumption. A prototype constructed for a 115 W HBLED driver is developed and the devised dimming schemes are realized by a digital signal controller (DSC). Experimental results exhibited with illuminance-power curves and CIE1931 and CIE1976 chromaticity diagrams are given to validate the theoretical derivation and effectiveness. Compared with conventional PWM dimming, under the same illuminance, the driver average output power is respectively reduced by 17.08% and 13.17%; the improvement in average illuminance under the same output power is 13.66% and 11.17%, respectively. In addition, the entire average LE boost has respectively increased by 21.36% and 16.37%.