Design and Analysis of Wireless Ballastless Fluorescent Lighting

In this paper, a wireless ballastless lighting system for fluorescent lamps is proposed and implemented. The key is to utilize magnetic resonant coupling to achieve wireless power transfer (WPT) while igniting the fluorescent lamp without using any magnetic or electronic ballast. Meanwhile, series-parallel compensation is identified to be more suitable for this WPT system. Also, burst firing control is utilized to achieve efficient light dimming. In order to achieve the fully wireless feature, remote lighting control via Bluetooth is realized by a smart phone. As an example, an experimental setup, which can light up an 8 W fluorescent lamp with illuminance of 2330 lx, has been designed and developed. In particular, it can achieve the transmission efficiency of 57% and the operating frequency of 51 kHz, with distance up to 56 cm. Both theoretical analyses and experimental results are given to validate the feasibility and flexibility of the proposed system.