Hello friends, welcome to another article. In this tutorial we will learn about AC dimmer circuit and will make one using TRIAC.
If we want to turn ON/OFF our home-appliances like TV, BULB, FAN etc. we can directly do this digitally using Relay with any microcontroller like Arduino. Here turning ON/OFF is great way of making home-automation setup. but in some cases we don’t need only digitally ON/OFF we also want, like controlling the speed of fan, brightness of bulb. these mechanism we can not achieve using relay. Here we need AC dimmer circuit to control the brightness of bulb or speed of fan.
In DC circuit we achieve this mechanism using PWM pins of microcontroller we don’t need separate circuit for it.
There are lots of ways to make AC dimmer circuit, In this article we will use phase control technique and static switches like TRIAC to control the phase of AC supply voltage.
Here a TRIAC is used to switch the AC lamp, as this is a Power electronic fast switching device which is the best suited for these applications.