High voltage, mercury-free fluorescent lamps with cold cathodes: state of art and future developments

While manufacturers of low voltage fluorescent tubes have made efforts and improvements towards reducing the mercury consumption, recycling processes are starting to be implemented to reduce further the environmental impact at the end of the lamp life, The luminous sign business has been slow to implement these improvements, and the quantity of mercury currently used is a hundred to a thousand times greater than is technically necessary. The needs In this industry are for sources of bright and saturated colors with an acceptable efficiency. The scope of this paper is to introduce some aspects of the problems that an engineer and scientist have to solve for the optimisation of a such complicated and multi-disciplinary system