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Thyristor Project: Light Dimmer

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DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.11673.06246

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 Department of Electronic and Telecommunications
University of Moratuwa
EN 2110 - Electronics-III

Thyristor Project: Light Dimmer

R.M.V.B. Senanayake 160570C
N.A.M.P. Nissanka 160447G
K.P.D.U. Kahatapitiya 160260C
U.K.W.D.M.R.N.C Navanjana 160426R
T.M. Piyadigama 160490F

This is submitted as a partial fulfilment of the module

EN 2110 : Electronics III
Department of Electronic and Telecommunication Engineering
University of Moratuwa

04.01.2019
 1

Thyristor Project: Light Dimmer

R.M.V.B. Senanayake 160570C
N.A.M.P. Nissanka 160447G
K.P.D.U. Kahatapitiya 160260C
Navanjana U.K.W.D.M.R.N.C. 160426R
T.M. Piyadigama 160490F
Electronic and Telecommunications Department
University of Moratuwa

I. I NTRODUCTION AND P ROBLEM It is inefficient to use a variable capacitor of

S TATEMENT variable inductor instead of the resistor because
The ability to change intensity of light is such devises are comparatively expensive bulky
required for some occasions. It is not only for and less accurate. When considering higher
common needs as bedroom lights and decorative power transfer these devices are less feasible.
aspect but also for industrial application like Fortunately, there is another way of control-
monitor screens and displays. ling the current through circuit: Switching. This
time it is not trying to control current continu-
The dimming can be obtained by controlling
ously or to change the amplitude but to cut the
the current through the light source. Then the
current in order to get a sequence of pulses of
problem is to minimize the additional energy
which the width can be controlled as desired.
needed to obtain the dimming capability. Higher
Though the current amplitude or the intensity
dynamic range and smooth continuous change of
amplitude does not change the effective value (or
intensity are desired characteristics.
the mean) of the pulse sequence will be changed
accordingly with pulse width.
II. R ELATED W ORK
Though discreet in nature, this type of dimmer
Dimmers are instruments which controls the pocess higher energy efficiency. As the energy
current through a light source. The most ba- dissipation through a switch is virtually zero.
sic way of controlling current is to connect When a switch is open current through the
a variable resistor serially to the light source. switch is zero while voltage is equal to the sup-
When a specific voltage (DC or AC) applied the ply voltage, while when it is closes the current
variable resistor will change the current through flows through it while the voltage is zero. In both
the circuit so dimming can be achievable. occasions, the power dissipation is zero.
However this is not the approach of a power Hence a power dimmer can be efficiently
dimmer. The above mentioned dimmer is highly implemented by a switch. The frequency of
inefficient as the current through the light source the pulses should be high to the extent which
also flows through the variable resistor conse- an observer cannot identify discreetness of the
quently dissipating undesirable huge amount of emission of light.
power at the resistor. Therefore this kind of This switching of high frequency has to be
dimmer is highly inefficient. As a rule of thumb automated. Then we have to use electronic com-
resistors are devices in signal processing but not ponents which have switching capability. Power
in power electronics.(Erickson, 1997) electronic components that has switching capa-
 2

bility are thyristors, power transistors (BJTs) and

IGBTs. These devices can be used for various
designs.

Fig. 2. Current wave form and trigger pulses at the gate for a
leading edge dimmer

Cheap and available SCR and TRIACs are not

fully controlled switches. They can be triggered
Fig. 1. Basic Triac Dimmer
to On stage by a pulse at a gate but cannot be
change to OFF state until the input current is
above a certain value: hold off current. Therefore
SCRs and TRIACs can only be used for leading
edge dimmers. GTOs, SCSs or IGBTs which can
be triggered into OFF state also are required for
trailing edge dimmer implementations.
TRIAC dimmers are very popular for mid
Thyristor dimmers are commonplace because
power level dimming. SCRs are unidirectional
thyristors are cheaper and available. TRIAC,
switches while TRIACs are bidirectional. ”How-
SCR, GTO and SCS are several thyristors that
ever, in most applications, one half of the device
can be used for making dimmers. This will be the
must block forward current immediately after
switching device of a dimmer. However before
the other half has ceased conduction, a very
understanding specific details of this dimmers
difficult requirement. Because of the interaction
we think it is better to introduce two classes of
of the two halves, it has not been possible to
the dimmers at the moment.
build triacs with voltage, current, or frequency
ratings as high as those readily obtainable in
There are two classes of dimmers: leading thyristors. Therefore, high power AC switches
edge and trailing edge dimmers. Both kind work must be implemented with thyristors.” (Motto,
with AC supply. The leading edge dimmers cut 1977) SCR dimmers can be implemented as
current wave form after a zero crossing while using two SCRs for the positive and negative
trailing edge dimmers cut before a zero crossing. direction or using a rectifier to make the SCR
That is to say leading edge dimmers are opened effectively bidirectional to the outside of the
at the begining of the waveform and closed after rectifier.
a decided phase while trailing edge dimmers are This leading edge dimmers has some draw-
closed at the begining and opened after a decided backs that a novel type of technology trailing
phase. edge dimmers came into existence. Leading edge
 3

cutting creates radio electric disturbances that

will affect on mains supply. Therefore a con-
ventional mains filter is used to filters out this
disturbances at the industry level. Such filter is
simply a inductance in series and a capacitor
in parallel. The inductance is to smooth the
leading edge while capacitor is to limit the power
through the inductor. This assembly specifically
use of the inductance make the dimmer ex-
pensive and bulky while the inductance is not
integrable. At low power range lamp flicker also
observable due to this inductance. The coil in
the inductance will be vibrated with a buzzing
noise making the dimmer unsuitable for noise
sensitive environments. Trailing edge dimmers
are not required an inductance to disturbances.
Fig. 4. Leading edge and trailing edge current wave forms
(US patent 6294901B1)
However all bulbs are not dimmable. Flu-
orescent bulbs are undimmable and there are
both types of dimmable and nondimmable LED
bulbs. Dimmable LED bulbs needs some special
requirements comparing to incandescent bulbs.
Leading edge dimmers are suitable for resistive
and inductive loads while trailing edge dimmers
are the most suitable type for resistive and capac-
itive loads. Since LED bulbs are capacitive loads.
Trailing edge dimmer is one of the requirement
for LED dimmers. Incandecent bulbs do not
Fig. 3. Leading edge dimmer mains filtering
require a specific class because they are mostly
resistive loads.

Both classes need a circuit to set the triggering III. P ROPOSED S OLUTION
pulse at the desired phase. For this phase trigger- At first stage of this project we planned to
ing part there are various applications both ana- build a trailing edge dimmer and designed the
log and digital. Using microcontrollers, ICs or circuit. It is required to use a GTO.
digital modules can be seen in the industry. The However at the implementation stage, we had
basic analog application is to charge a capacitor a very limited time and found that some essential
to a constant voltage limited by a zenor diode components are unavailable in the local market
(or DIAC -in directly) and used the triggering and no sufficient time for importing.
point to be the point where zenor diode passes Therefore we disigned a light dimmer using
a current. The time to charge the capacitor is triac and mains filter with one additional capac-
controlled by RC product of the branch where R itive filtering.
is controlled by a variable resistor. This simple
assembly can be modified in order to have linear IV. S PECIFICATIONS
or another shape response and to give even neg- The circuit could be implement in a small
ative and null pulses as well as positive pulses. scale as possible. The dimmer should be inex-
 4

pensive as possible. The device should generate cycle begin from the zero crossing stage the ca-
little disturbance to the main. The dimmer should pacitor C3 (see appendix for schematic) charged
be able to operate by a human user with simple with a time constant ditermined by R1 R3 and
knowhow. variable resistor R2. When the capacitor voltage
is above a certain value determined by DIAC
V. S IMULATION R ESULTS the TRIAC will be triggered to ON state. Hence
the circuit is short circuit through the TRIAC
making the voltage between output terminals
of the dimmer to be zero.Then the capacitor
also discharge through the TRIAC while it is
ON preparing the capacitor for the next half
cycle. L1 Res1 C1 is the mains filter and R4
C4 is a supporting filter to make the leading
edge smooth in order to reduce electromagnetic
disturbunces to the mains filter. C2 capacitor is
used as supporting capacitor for C3 to ensure the
smooth behaviour of the capacitor

IX. R EFERENCES
Motto J.W. Introduction to solid state power
electronics, 1977
Erickson R.W. Fundamentals of power
Fig. 5. Phase Cut current wave form electronics 1997
US Patent US6,294,901 B1 2001
VI. I MPLEMENTATION
Selected TRIAC was BT139 because it was
readily available. A potentiometer is used to con-
trol the phase angle as it was providing a good
interface for non technical users considering the
familiarity of potentiometers in volume controlls
and other day to day instruments. Capacitors
and resistor values for the triggering circuits
was calculated based on mentally simulation and
prototype testing.

VII. E XPERIMENTAL R ESULTS

We test the result with a bulb as the load
and the oscilloscope to find the voltage between
the bulb and obtain the required dimming while
getting the phase controlled leading edge cut
wave form.

VIII. C ONCLUSION
The functionality of the dimmer can be
demonstrated in following steps.When a halph
 5

X. A PPENDIX

A. schematic

Fig. 6. Schematic

Consider that actual values of components as follows

TRIAC BT139
R1= 1k
R2 = 100k
R3 = 1k
R4 = 100k
R5 = 150k
C1 =0.1uF
C2=0.05uF
C3=o.1uF
C4=0.1uF
L= 47uF
 6

B. layout

Fig. 7. Layout

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