Use of Chaotic Switching in Electronic Ballasts

This paper investigates the use of chaotic pulsewidth modulation (CPWM) scheme for electronic ballasts to eliminate visible striations (appearance of black and white bands along the lamp tube) in fluorescent lamps. As striations can be eliminated by superimposing a small amount of dc current or low frequency ac current to the electrodes to produce composite current waveform through the lamp, the underlying principle of this work is based on the fact that the power spectral density of the lamp current will be rich of low-frequency harmonics at the output of inverters switching with CPWM. Most importantly, the lamp life will not be affected with chaotic switchings, because the lamp current crest factor is found to be similar to the one with standard pulsewidth modulation (PWM) and the lamp current does not have dc component. The effectiveness of eliminating striations is confirmed experimentally with a T8 36W prototype.