Electronic Ballast Using a Symmetrical Half-bridge Inverter Operating at Unity-Power-factor and High Efficiency

This paper deals with novel electronic ballast based on single-stage power processing topology using a symmetrical half-bridge inverter and current injection circuit. The half-bridge inverter drives the output parallel resonant circuit and injects current through the power factor correction (PFC) circuit. Because of high frequency current injection and high frequency modulated voltage, the proposed circuit maintains the unity power factor (UPF) with low THD even under wide variation in ac input voltage. This circuit needs minimum and lower sized components to achieve the UPF and high efficiency. This leads to an increase in reliability of ballast at low cost. Furthermore, to reduce cost, the electronic ballast is designed for two series-connected fluorescent lamps (FL). The analysis and experimental results are presented for ($2{\times}36$ Watt) fluorescent lamps operating at 50 kHz switching frequency and input line voltage (230 V, 50 Hz).