Fault-Tolerant LED Lighting Systems Featuring Minimal Loss of Luminous Flux

The adoption of lighting systems based on LED technologies gain further significance as these technologies become mature, particularly within the context of homes and offices. LED technologies are well-known for the superior reliability standards and extended lifetime. Unfortunately, power electronic technologies used to drive LED lighting systems are unable to reach identical levels of longevity. Particularly, active semiconductors pose one of the major hurdles to the full exploitation of the LEDs lifetime. This paper proposes a fault-tolerant LED driver, derived from the single-inductor multiple-output (SIMO) topology, which combines the benefits of fault tolerance, multiple and independent fixture control, and full dimming range, on a single LED driver. Two alternative reconfiguration strategies ensure, whenever feasible, that none of the LED fixtures suffer significant depreciation of luminous flux during the post-fault driver operation. Simulation and experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed fault-tolerant LED driver.