Design of New LED Drive using Energy Recovery Circuit

The high-power LED (Light Emitting Diode) which is recently gaining popularity as a digital light source has such advantages as low power consumption, long life, fast switching speed, and high efficiency. Thus, many efforts are being made to use the high-power LEDs for general lighting. This paper proposes LED driving circuit uses a DC/DC converter that can recover energy to compensate for the current variations caused by changes in LED equivalent resistance following a temperature change instead of serial resistance. The maximum input voltage of this DC/DC converter has low voltage variations by temperature change when the rated current is formed. In order to return current to the input side, we need a high boosting at low power. Thus, to improve the low efficiency of power converter, the power converter can be configured in such a way to gather the powers of low-capacity DC/DC converters and return the total power. Experiments showed that the proposed system improved efficiency compared to the conventional LED drive using the existing DC/DC converter.