Development of an electronic starter using a half-wave rectifier for fluorescent lamps

반파정류를 이용한 형광램프용 전자식 스타터의 개발

A low-cost electronic starter is developed to decrease ignition failure significantly through successive starting trial and to prevent overheating at the end of fluorescent lamp life. Moreover, it has an additional feature of being capable of ignition at the recovered lamp voltage without any circuit correction. The developed electronic starter is consisted of four parts - a half wave rectifier circuit, a timer circuit, a switching circuit and a protection circuit. The protection circuit made up of a transistor and capacitors utilizing capacitive characteristics, carries out successive starting trial and end-of-life protection. Lamp ignition is completed within 0.5 seconds with taking advantage of a high preheating current from the half-wave rectifier circuit. Nevertheless, its performance is proved to be very excellent through a standard switching endurance test.