Analysis and implementation of a novel single-stage low-frequency electronic ballast for HID lamps

Abstract

The paper presents a single-stage high-power-factor electronic ballast for metal halide lamps. The proposed ballast integrates a buck-boost converter, a buck converter and a full-bridge inverter into a single power conversion circuit. The buck-boost converter served as a power-factor corrector (PFC) is designed to operate at discontinuous conduction mode (DCM) to achieve nearly a unity power factor at the input line. By adjusting the duty-ratio of the active switches of the PFC, the lamp power is remained at rated value for universal input voltage ranged from 90 Vrms to 264 Vrms. The four active switches of the full-bridge inverter, an inductor and a capacitor form a bidirectional buck converter which supplies a low frequency square-wave current for the lamp at to avoid the lamp from happing acoustic resonance. The circuit operation is analyzed in detail to derive the design equations. A prototype electronic ballast for a 70 W metal halide lamp is built and tested. Experimental measurements are provided to verify that the proposed ballast has the merits of a nearly unity input power factor, high circuit efficiency and the metal halide lamp is free of acoustic resonance.