Design of electronic ballast for short-arc xenon lamps

In this paper, a dimmable electronic ballast is developed to drive a 500 W short-arc Xenon lamp. The proposed electronic ballast comprises a high-voltage igniter arc-generating circuit and a DC arc-sustaining power supply circuit. High-voltage ignition circuit aims at reducing the size of circuit by using a two-stage voltage booster to equip the Xenon lamp with sufficient igniting voltage. The DC power supply is designed by integrating a LLC resonant converter with a rectifying filter to feed short-arc Xenon lamp with stable and high-efficiency arc-sustaining power. The proposed electronic ballast is featured with dimmable capability needing no extra circuit with dimming range from 32% to 100% of rated output. This study accomplishes and summarized the stepwise design procedure of short-arc electronic ballast. In the end, the validity and availability of electronic ballast are verified by practical measurements.