Digital Control Strategy for HID Lamp Electronic Ballasts

This paper presents the analysis, design, simulation and experimental results of a digital control strategy applied to an electronic ballast to supply a 70-W high-pressure-sodium lamp. The electronic ballast consists of a single-stage converter that integrates a buck converter to provide power factor correction and two flyback converters to supply the lamp, with low frequency square waveform, in order to avoid the acoustic resonance phenomenon occurrence. The proposed digital control strategy is composed of three control loops: voltage loop for lamp ignition and warm-up, an inner current loop for steady state, and a slow outer power loop to maintain the lamp power constant during its useful life. The lamp dynamic model is included to the ac model of the converter, so the effects of its right-half-plane zero are considered to design the digital control system. Fixed-point simulation is presented using Q base number format, where the exact variable values employed in the microcontroller code are used. Experimental results are included to demonstrate the performance of the proposed digital control strategy.