Light Flicker Frequencies in the HID lamps

Abstract

In order to reduce the electric consumption for high intensity discharge lamps (HID), the use of high frequencies electronic ballasts represents both a solution and many advantages such as, the decrease in the congestion, low costs and weak losses, approximately 10%. However it is not regarded as perfectly reliable, this is due in a great part to the appearance of Acoustic Resonances inside the arc tube which can result in low frequency light flicker and even lamp destruction. Experimentally we used a HID lamp of 50 W and we determined, light flicker frequencies and the arc motion frequencies using a photodiode which detects the light intensity fluctuation and a camera to record the arc motion. The experiment was done in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Production, Hamburg University of Applied Sciences.