Power fed electronic ballast

Medium to high power electronic ballasts are typically designed with two power conversion stages. The first, PFC, stabilizes the voltage supplied to the second stage and forces the utility current to meet the required standard. The second, inverter section, stabilizes the arc in the lamp. To rely on the PFC section to provide the stability of the system, while the inverter operates in open loop, has several benefits since the complex short and long-term behavior of the lamp has no influence on the design and the dimming control is easily implemented. The inverter section is an LC/sub P/C/sub S/ resonant inverter designed to require minimum variation of the input voltage to supply constant power to the lamp. The paper shows the overall performance of the proposed power fed electronic ballast, paying special attention to the power stability under load changes.