Characteristics of a novel ballast circuit for HID lamps

Developments in HID (high intensity discharge) lamps have increasingly been attracting interest due to their highly efficient operation and excellent color characteristics. This paper presents a novel type of solid-state ballast circuit for the HID lamps. The key feature of the circuit topology is the application of a boost-type converter. The proposed circuit is very simple, being composed of a reactor, a capacitor, an output transformer, and a switching device IGBT (insulated gate bipolar transistor). A 70 W metal-halide lamp (an HID lamp) is used in this circuit The performance characteristics of this proposed ballast circuit are described in this paper. Based on the theoretical and experimental results the proposed ballast circuit is suitable for the HID lamps.