A new control method for the high frequency electronic ballast

This work presents a new control method for the high frequency electronic ballast, which is operated with half bridge resonant inverter converting raw rectified DC to AC. For the commercial electronic ballast, proper AC input power factor and crest factor of the lamp current are required. The most ballast, therefore, has an active or passive power factor correction (PFC) circuit. With the proposed method, it can be achieved simultaneously that greater than 0.91 of input power factor and less than 1.8 of lamp current crest factor without any PFC circuit. In this paper, the proposed ballast control scheme is described and in order to verify the validity of proposed scheme, the experimental results for the application to the fluorescent lamp are discussed.