Common LED lighting dimming control methods and their advantages and disadvantages-TRIAC dimming

For lighting, dimming is very important. Not only is it to get a more comfortable environment in the home, but today, it is more important to reduce unnecessary electric light in order to further realize the purpose of energy saving and emission reduction. And for LED lighting, dimming is easier to achieve than other fluorescent lamps, energy-saving lamps, and high-pressure sodium lamps. Commonly LED lamp dimming control methods are: TRIAC dimming, 0-10V dimming, PWM dimming, DALI dimming.

TRIAC dimming:

TRIAC dimmers, also known as phase-cut dimmers are probably the most commonly used dimming control systems. In the past, building an ideal structure of LED lights with phase-cut or TRIAC dimmers has been a challenge. However, with the development, new TRIAC dimming drivers have been created for LED lights making the configuration much easier and simpler.

The advantages of TRIAC dimming are higher working efficiency and stable performance. However, based on its working principle, there are also some design defects in application. The root cause of the defect is that after the thyristor is turned on, a sustain current is required to maintain the conduction, otherwise it will return to the off state. Different thyristors maintain different currents, usually between a few mA to tens of mA, and some even reach 50 mA. The greater the power, the greater the maintenance current required. If the maintenance current is not enough, the conduction angle will be unstable, the output waveform will be uneven, and vibration and spikes will be generated. When such an unstable output is added to the LED It will flicker when it is up. Because the previous incandescent lamp is a linear load, and the working current generally exceeds 50mA, there will be no flicker.

For this problem, LIGHT VICTOR has several solutions of driving power for TRIAC dimmer lighting products, which can assure no flicker even lower to the wattage of 0 or a more cost-effective solution, to turn off the light at a relatively low wattage like 2w directly, that is no flicker.