A Dimmable High Power Factor Single-Switch Electronic Ballast for Compact Fluorescent Lamps With Incandescent Phase-Cut Dimmers

A novel dimmable high-power-factor compact fluorescent lamp (CFL) electronic ballast that is compatible with standard incandescent lamp dimmers is proposed in this paper. In the proposed system, the dimming controller uses the phase angle of the dimmer as the input feedforward parameter for the duty ratio control of the switch in the power circuit. As a result, a wide range of light output can be achieved with a small range of phase angles of the phase-cut dimmer. The ballast power circuit is a single-switch single-stage resonant inverter, which is essentially a fusion of a SEPIC converter and a single-switch current-fed inverter. Detailed operating principles of the proposed system will be discussed in this paper. System stability analysis that includes the effects of the phase-cut dimmer is also provided. Experimental results are given for a 13-W CFL to demonstrate and highlight the merits of the proposed work.