Study of Igniter in Low-Frequency Square Wave Electronic Ballasts for Metal Halide Lamps

Metal halide lamps (MHLs) have serious acoustic resonance problem. The most widely used method to achieve acoustic-resonance free is to use low-frequency square wave (LFSW) electronic ballasts. There are two ignition methods commonly used in LFSW electronic ballast: high-frequency resonance ignition and additional pulse igniter. This paper analyzed the problems during ignition while using the conventional additional pulse igniter and proposed some solutions. A novel high-frequency resonance igniter is also proposed, where no extra semiconductors and feedback control circuit are needed to perform the ignition. High-voltage ignition pulses are obtained by utilizing the fast polarity inversion of the output voltage of full-bridge inverter. Theoretical analysis, simulation, and experiment results of a prototype for 70-W MHLs verified the effectiveness of both the proposed solutions and the igniter.