Single-stage electronic ballast with class-E rectifier as power-factor corrector

A single-stage high-power-factor electronic ballast with a Class-E rectifier as a power-factor corrector is proposed. A Class-E rectifier is inserted between the front-end bridge rectifier and the bulk filter capacitor to increase the conduction angle of the bridge-rectifier diode current for obtaining low line-current harmonics. The Class-E rectifier is driven by a high-frequency sinusoidal current source, which is obtained from the square-wave output voltage of the Class-D inverter through an LC series resonant circuit. A high-frequency transformer is used for impedance matching. The experimental results for a 32-W prototype ballast are given. The switching frequency was 61.3 kHz. At full power, the power factor was 0.992 and the total ballast efficiency was 88.3%. The lamp-current crest factor was about 1.36. The simulated and experimental results were in very good agreement.