Evaluation of Luminous Efficacy of Fluorescent Lamps Using Short Pulsed Dielectric Barrier Discharge

Due to recent tendencies to eliminate the electrodes in discharge lamps, this paper presents a feasibility study to determine whether is possible to replace electrode terminals with capacitance coupling (dielectric barrier discharge) operating as glow discharge. The results showed that is possible to operate a fluorescent lamp using dielectric barrier discharge (DBD) at relatively low frequencies (100 kHz-200 kHz) and obtain a considerable large luminous efficacy. This paper will especially focus on the use of DBD combined with short high voltage pulses. The short high voltage pulses are obtained from a class-E-converter with output transformer. In the introduction part is presented a general review about three different ways to obtain an electrodeless lamp, in the second part is showed how was implemented the capacitive coupling, the next part presents the used model and the followed method to estimate the coupling capacitors, continuing the prototype is presented and finally in the last section the results are presented and discussed