What is an Electronic Ballast?

Electronic ballasts will be the main object of introduction to the following content. Through this article, I hope you can have some knowledge and understanding of electronic ballasts and the advantages of electronic ballasts and information. The details are as follows.

1. What is an electronic ballast?

Electronic ballasts are electronic devices that use electronic technology to drive electric light sources to produce the desired lighting. Corresponding to the electronic ballast is the inductive ballast. More and more modern fluorescent lamps use light and compact electronic ballasts, and it is even possible to integrate electronic ballasts with the lamp. At the same time, electronic ballasts usually have the function of a starter, so a separate starter can be omitted.

Electronic ballasts can also have more functions, such as improving or eliminating the flickering phenomenon of fluorescent lamps by increasing the current frequency or current waveform (such as a square wave); electronic ballasts can also make fluorescent lamps use DC power through a power reversal process. Some shortcomings of traditional inductive ballasts make them replaced by increasingly mature electronic ballasts.

Inductive ballast has a relatively large market share as the first ballast to work with fluorescent lamps due to its simple structure and long life. However, due to its low power factor, low-voltage starting performance is poor, energy consumption, and cumbersome , stroboscopic and many other shortcomings, its market is slowly replaced by electronic ballasts.

Electronic ballasts are electronic control devices that use semiconductor electronic components to convert DC or low-frequency AC voltage into high-frequency AC voltage to drive low-pressure gas discharge lamps (sterilization lamps), tungsten halogen lamps and other light sources.

2. The most widely used electronic ballast for fluorescent lamps

Due to the adoption of modern soft-switching inverter technology, advanced active power factor correction technology and electronic filtering measures, the electronic ballast has good electromagnetic compatibility and reduces the self-loss of the ballast.

To distinguish whether the electronic ballast is good or bad, remove the starter, disconnect the power supply, and test both ends of the ballast. If the ballast is an older inductive type, the inductive type can use this method to test whether the coil is burned out. This kind of old-fashioned ballast is broken, usually the coil is blown, resulting in no voltage at both ends of the lamp, which will not cause the lamp to burn out.

There are many situations for electronic ballasts. You can measure the resistance of the three ballasts according to the method mentioned above to see if there is a big difference, so as to judge whether the ballast is damaged.