It is highly important issue to use an energy efficiently for sustainable prosperity of mankind. From this point of view, using LED lighting can be a good alternative because it has a lot of advantages such as high efficiency, long life time and eco-friendly manufacturing process. That is the reason why using LED lighting has been encouraged worldwide. However, in situations that LED lighting is replacing traditional lighting quickly, the problem of the flicker of LED lighting has emerged as an important issue. Therefore, in foreign countries like US or Japan in order to ensure the reliability of LED lighting, study for flickering effects of the human body and test methods are have been actively conducted. But related research in domestic situation is an insufficient condition. In this study, a flicker characteristic was measured conventional lamps such as incandescent lamps or fluorescent lamp and 81 items of LED lightings which are distributed in domestic markets.
This study describes that light flicker of LED lamp is improved by placing an AC-powered LED block in each phase of three-phase AC power. Rectified current is considered as an instantaneous luminous flux because the current flowing through the LED block is proportional to the amount of light emitted by the LED block. Percent flicker is calculated simply by modeling the rectified current flowing through the LED block to a triangular wave current. Percent flicker is 100% in single-phase AC powered LED lamp. Percent flicker of the same level as that in an incandescent lamp (6%∼14%) is however, achieved if light emission starts before 40° in each voltage phase of three-phase AC power.