Nonlinear dimming and correlated color temperature control of bicolor white LED systems

This paper proposes a nonlinear approach of controlling the luminous intensity and correlated color temperature (CCT) of white light-emitting diode (LED) systems with dual color temperatures. This LED system is made up of a warm color LED source (2700 K) and a cool color LED source (5000 K). The luminous intensity of each of these LED sources is individually controlled by pulsewidth modulation. The overall intensity of the LED system is due to the combined emitted flux of both LED sources. Its overall CCT is the mixed average CCT of both LED sources. This proposed method is based on the nonlinear empirical luminous and CCT models of the LEDs, which take into consideration the thermal effect of LEDs on its luminance and CCT properties. With reasonable approximation, the theoretical models are simplified into practical solutions, which are translatable into real-life applications. It is experimentally validated that the proposed approach is considerably more accurate than the existing linear approaches that do not consider color variations of LED sources. The idea is applicable to LED systems with multiple color temperatures and is not limited to white LEDs.