This paper proposes an electronic ballast having high power factor and high efficiency. The electronic ballast consists of a power factor correction circuit and a resonant inverter. Instead of passive power factor circuit, active power factor circuit is adopted. Because it has the advantage of size, weight, total harmonic distortion, out DC voltage regulation, and power factor. The power factor circuit with KA7514 is controlled by variable frequency discontinuous mode for getting high efficiency and low inductor current. A current source type inverter is taken up for its simplicity due to no necessity of lamp protection circuit. Detailed design procedure of the current source type resonant inverter is described. The proposed ballast satisfies almost all of the requirement for power factor, total harmonic distortion, lamp current crest factor, efficiency, etc.
Experiments are performed for driving two FL40T12 fluorescent lamps to verify the proposed electronic ballast's operation and characteristics.
