Solution to the warm up problems on HID sodium lamp ballasts controlled by resonant current

On several papers about powering HID Lamps by electronic ballasts have been demonstrated that LCC topologies are the better choice. Some papers propose design methods for both LCC-SP and LCC-PS circuits and their profits and drawbacks have been shown. Also those papers have demonstrated that making use of the resonant current control RCC, obtains an efficient, safety and long life ballast. This paper studies the warm up stage that other papers don´t consider, just when the discharge begins and the RCC could present an erratic behavior, and proposes a starting method to avoid that problem. Also, this method provides a faster warm up stage in the lamp.