Feed-Forward Scheme for an Electrolytic Capacitor-Less AC/DC LED Driver to Reduce Output Current Ripple

In order to achieve high-efficiency, high-power-factor, high-reliability, and low-cost, a flicker-free electrolytic capacitor-less single-phase ac/dc light emitting diode (LED) driver is investigated in this paper. This driver is composed of a power-factor-correction (PFC) converter and a bidirectional converter. The bidirectional converter is used to absorb the second harmonic component in the output current of the PFC converter, thus producing a pure dc output to drive the LEDs. The spectrum of the output capacitor voltage of the bidirectional converter is analyzed, indicating that the output capacitor voltage contains harmonic components at multiples of twice the line frequency apart from the dc component and second harmonic component. A feed-forward control scheme with a series of calculation operation is proposed to obtain the desired modulation signal, which contains the corresponding harmonic components, to ensure the bidirectional converter fully absorb the second harmonic current in the output of the PFC converter. Finally, a 33.6 W prototype is fabricated and tested in the lab, and the experiment results show that the proposed control scheme greatly reduces the ripple of the LED driving current.