Characteristics of single-ended resonant-type inverter for HID lamps

This paper presents a novel type of solid state ballast and ignitor for HID (high intensity discharge) lamps. This ballast is composed of a single-ended resonant-type inverter, which can supply high frequency (100 kHz) power to a 70 W metal-halide lamp, one of the HID lamps, without an acoustic resonance. The proposed ignitor is composed of a magnetic pulse compression (MPC) circuit, which can generate sufficiently high voltage pulses for the instantaneous restarting of the HID lamp. The characteristics of this proposed inverter and ignitor circuits for HID lamps are described in this paper. Based on the results obtained from experiments, the proposed circuits are more useful than the conventional one.