A current balancing scheme with high luminous efficiency for high power LED lighting

The current imbalance in driving LED strings will cause fast degradation or even failure in some LEDs that should be avoided in LED applications. This paper presents a current balancing method based on the pulse-width modulation of a common bus voltage to each LED string to achieve the intended averaged current. For the balance of a common averaged current, a small duty cycle will necessitate a large LED turn-on current amplitude, which may cause temporal overheat and low luminous efficacy of LEDs. An optimal feedback control scheme is proposed to maximize the duty cycles and minimize the bus voltage. As a result, at lease one of the LED string is operating at a unity duty cycle. The analysis, implementation and verification are detailed in this paper.