How to choose qualified Led driver

When people buy a Led bulb or other Led lights in the market, the main concern of the bought is the quality. All Led light manufacturers claim always to focus on products’ quality in order to win the local market. But the fact is that Led lights’ quality varies from one brand to another. For the end consumers, they want to know what affects the Led light’s quality. However, for the Led light manufacturer and factory, you need to know more details concerning the quality. As a experienced Led light factory, Quark lighting wants to share some useful information.

There are so many factors to influence Led light’s quality, but we want to talk these factors one by one. Let’s begin with Led driver.

What’s a Led driver? Led driver means a small electrical device to offer and regulate the power to LEDs. It’s a crucial electronical piece for light. We can say that the LED light cannot work without a Led driver. A high-quality and correct Led driver determines directly the lifespan of Led light.

How to produce a high-quality Led driver:

Quark lighting designs and produces Led drivers for Led lighting factories since 8 years. According to our experience, a high-quality Led driver should be produced according to the following steps:

• Led circuit design: Good and reasonable circuit design makes LEDs work more efficiently
• Sample testing: Sample testing lets engineers to adjust the drivers’ function
• Electronical components purchasing: High quality raw materials guarantee the drivers’ lifespan
• Accurate production
• 100% burn-in test

As an electronic device, Led driver needs accurate and stable electronic components. We’ll illustrate the composition of one excellent quality isolated Led driver. But please note that different drivers come out with the different electrical circuits.

Important factors to determine the lifespan of Led drivers:

Temperature:

The most important factor is temperature. Working temperature and ambient temperature effect together the driver’s function. As Led driver is composed by many pieces of electronic components, some electronic components’ function and lifespan are greatly affected by temperature. Take the capacitor as an example. One general capacitor( －40－＋105 degree)’s service life can be guaranteed for 4000 hrs (under the circumstance of max load of capacitor at 105 degrees) . If we design the maximum load of the capacitor ripple current up to 85%, the life of capacitor at 65 degrees can be guaranteed for 80000 hrs, and then the life of capacitor at 75 degrees can be only guaranteed for 40000 hrs. Please see below the comparison of capacitor’s lifespan at different degrees.

We can infer that the life of the capacitor will be halved every 10 degrees of temperature rise.

Therefore, a high quality Led driver should have a low working temperature for main power components in order to guarantee a long lifespan. One well-designed Led driver controls the main power component’s temperature between 25 to 30 degrees. Some bad-designed driver’s component temperature may arrive at 35 degrees or above.

Electronic Components:  The core electronic components of Led driver include switch controller, inductor, MOSfet, Feedback resistance, Capacitor, IC, Transformer etc. The tiniest piece of electronic component on the PCB board fails or becomes aging and unstable will let the Led driver stop working. It’s very important to resource and purchase qualified and stable electronical components for the production of drivers. Quark lighting’s resourceful supply chain allows to acquire more qualified suppliers with reasonable price. All the electronic components and PCB suppliers for Quark are certified. Therefore, we can guarantee the quality of Led drivers and lights from the first step— material selection. 

Design of the Led driver:

Design for the Power: Though Led has a high light efficiency, we cannot ignore the temperature rise from 20 to 30 degrees due to the high heat loss up to 80% or 85%. The internal temperature of Led light will arrive at 45-55 degrees under the ambient temperature 25 degrees. It’s necessary to increase the power margin of Led lights to 1.5 to 2 times of power in order to guarantee the service life if the Led driver works longtime in high temperature environment.

Material selection: As we mentioned above, material selection is a key factor to determine the service life of Led driver. Especially the capacitor. When we begin the circuit design, we should concern on the material selection. We prefer to choose the electronic components that can work durable and longtime in high temperature. If you are not a professional buyer in the market, maybe it’s a little difficult to figure out all the details about electronic components. We suggest you to focus on the capacitor’s parameters: the service life of capacitor( by hours) and working temperature.

Electric parameters and PCB design: It’s complicated to discuss technical issues about Led driver design. We just share some typical and general information for driver design. As Led driver is a electric device to supply power for Leds, the first thing we should figure out should be current and voltage. If design an internal Led driver, you should also concern on the PCB size due to limited space for installing the driver in the Led light. Meanwhile the safety distance between PCB and light housing(shell) is an important issue to consider. Here are some other important factors to consider for PCB design:

• Heat dissipation and distribution
• Power components location and distribution

How to choose a correct Led driver for your light:

Before choosing LED drivers for your light project, you need to have some important points in your mind:

What are the main parameters of DRIVERS(Power, Voltage, Efficiency，Power factor etc)

What type of LED LIGHTINGS will be used(Bulbs, spotlight, LED tubes, Downlight ETC)

What type of LEDs will be used and how many?

What are the size limitations of drivers?

What are the requested features(dimming, waterproof, isolated or non-isolated etc)

Installation method of Led drivers( internal driver or external driver)

If you buy Led drivers from factory, it’s useful to communicate all these details to your supplier.