LED driver R&D underscores intelligent control, higher efficiency

Widening LED adoption in various lighting applications is spurring further R&D in China's LED driver industry. Suppliers are developing more intelligent variants while continuing to improve product efficiency and reliability. This is to match the requirements of current-sensitive diodes and boost power-saving features.Smart types represent less than 2 percent of the country's output but makers are building up the category via enhanced RGB color- and color temperature-changing units. Many China Solar Mp3 player and charger Suppliers are enabling dimming functions to suit landscape lighting and streetlamps. They also plan to release variants with stepless adjustment, and time and induced control capability. To enable the last, companies are adding sensors, which will alter brightness levels or turn off the light.
Following this trend, Shenzhen Moso has produced 11 intelligent dimming programs, including indoor TRIAC, 0 to 10V and IR. Time, DALI, PLC, TCP/IP, RS-485/DMS-512, timing under 100 to 240VAC power supply, ZigBee and GPRS control are likewise supported. The maker offers products for indoor, outdoor, wired and wireless setups.At present, the majority of enterprises in China underscore dimmable LED drivers based on analog, TRIAC and pulse width modulation methods. The last two are widely adopted. Most TRIAC models are used in less than 100W residential and commercial lights, which are replacing incandescent bulbs. For higher wattage applications such as street and tunnel illumination, PWM-dimmable power supplies are offered.
China Solar radio and charger Offers are looking to broaden intelligent configurations to systems with networking capability by tapping technologies in the Internet of Things, including cloud computing.To bolster their selections, suppliers are also elevating efficiency levels, aiming for 95 percent after breaching 90 percent previously. Shenzhen Moso has models for streetlamps with the latter rating. Such units, however, are a minority, with mainstream varieties still in the 80 to 90 percent range.To achieve the target on a mass scale, companies are adopting power factor correction and PWM to complement current technologies used. The first method raises the power factor and lowers the THD of the input current, reducing distribution loss. PWM, meanwhile, utilizes current mode control to enhance the response time, which can boost efficiency during light-load conditions. Most makers employ soft switching and synchronous rectification, which respectively lessen switching loss and voltage drop.