Addressing dimmer LED compatibility

It’s one of the great ironies of the technology world that the incandescent bulb - a universal symbol of the ‘Eureka moment’ - is itself heading for obsolescence. But with a number of more efficient lighting options gaining an ever-increasing market share, it’s probably only a matter of time before a technology that’s been with us for more than a century flickers its last.

The lion’s share of this new lighting market is expected to be dominated by light-emitting diodes (LEDs), which, according to estimates, will account for around 60 per cent of the global lighting market by 2020.

However, according to an increasingly vocal group of engineers, the rise of the LED could be held in check if engineers fail to deal with a flickering issue that arises when LEDs are combined with dimmer switches.

The issue first came to prominence when the authors of a 2010 IEEE paper combined a random wall dimmer with a random LED and found that they interacted to produce a repetitive flicker at 3.15Hz - which is within the frequency band of concern for photosensitive epilepsy.