How To Design a 250-W HID Electronic Ballast

Focus:

Typical street lighting applications today use high-intensity discharge (HID) lighting. These lamps are difficult to control and the design of the electronic HID ballast to drive them is complex. Some of the functions performed by the electronic HID ballast include ignition, warm-up, constant power control, power factor correction, and protection against all lamp and ballast fault conditions. This article describes an electronic ballast circuit for a 150-W HID lamp based on the popular three-stage topology and using the IRS2573D HID Control IC. The IRS2573D was developed in response to customer requests for a simpler HID ballast design solution, and is intended to make it easier for those who currently design fluorescent lamp ballasts to begin designing the more-complex HID ballasts. This article describes the fundamentals of HID lamp operation, lamp-drive requirements, the basic elements of the three-stage HID ballast topology, and the application circuit for the 150-W HID lamp ballast. In discussing the application circuit, the article explains how to calculate the value of the buck inductor and shows key waveforms for this circuit.

What you’ll learn:

• How to design an HID lamp ballast based on the IRS2573D HID Control IC
• How to understand operation of high-intensity discharge (HID) lamps and their drive requirements

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Author & Publication:

Tom Ribarich, International Rectifier, El Segundo, Calif., How2Power Today, Jun 29 2010

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