A modified valley fill electronic ballast having a current source resonant inverter with improved line-current total harmonic distortion (THD), high power factor, and low lamp crest factor

In this paper, a modified valley fill (VF) circuit is employed to combine with a current-fed resonant inverter as a passive high power factor (PF) electronic ballast. A conventional VF circuit limits the line current to conduct when the conduction angles are: 30 degrees <= wt <= 150 degrees and 210 degrees <= wt <= 330 degrees during the line period, which results in high total harmonic distortion (THD). The modified VF circuit has the following advantage: When the capacitors are connected in parallel, the voltage across the capacitors is one-third of the peak voltage, which allows the conduction angle of the line current to be further extended to 19.5 degrees <= wt <= 160.5 degrees and 199.5 degrees <= wt <= 340.5 degrees, so that a lower THD can be achieved. The high lamp crest factor (CF) problem generated by the high ripple voltage from the modified VF circuit is improved in the proposed ballast as variable frequency control is employed to continuously regulate the lamp current. An experimental prototype is then built in the laboratory to verify the feasibility of the proposed work for a 26-W compact fluorescent lamp. The final results confirm that a PF of 0.986 and a lamp CF of 1.49 are achieved with the proposed circuit, whereas a PF of 0.96 is achieved with the conventional VF ballast.