A Protection Circuit for the Power Supply of a Gas Discharge Lamp

In order to drive gas discharge lamps, DC-AC converters with a LCC resonant tank, whose output voltage is adjusted by a variable frequency control are frequently used. However, when they are activated by varying the operating frequency, converters are frequently damaged by unstable operation, due to the rising and falling of the operating frequency near the resonant frequency. To solve this problem, a simple protection circuit for the power supply of a gas discharge lamp is proposed in this paper. This circuit senses the primary current of the main transformer. Using this protection circuit, the operating frequency of the lamp driving inverter system is kept close to and on the right side of the resonant frequency and the inverter is always operated in the ZVS condition. The resulting stable variable frequency operation allows various gas discharge lamps to be tested without the risk of damaging the main switches, because the protection circuit can protect the power MOSFETs of bridge converters from abnormal conditions. The validity and effectiveness of the proposed protection circuit are verified through the experimental results.

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Cite this article

[IEEE Style]

H. Kim, J. Kim, J. Baek, D. Yoo, H. Jung, H. Kim, "A Protection Circuit for the Power Supply of a Gas Discharge Lamp," Journal of Power Electronics, vol. 10, no. 6, pp. 777-783, 2010. DOI: 10.6113/JPE.2010.10.6.777.

[ACM Style]

Ho-Sung Kim, Jong-Hyun Kim, Ju-Won Baek, Dong-Wook Yoo, Hye-Man Jung, and Hee-Je Kim. 2010. A Protection Circuit for the Power Supply of a Gas Discharge Lamp. Journal of Power Electronics, 10, 6, (2010), 777-783. DOI: 10.6113/JPE.2010.10.6.777.