Resonant Ballast for Photovoltaic Powered Street Lighting System in Remote Rural Area

This paper, electronic resonant ballast for a small photovoltaic powered street lighting system in remote rural area was proposed. The street lighting system was designed for rural area where the electrical transmission line cannot be commonly serviced and it is the cascade systems of the solar arrays, switching battery charger, and electronics ballast with small fluorescent lamp. The ballast is a simple single switch inverter having low harmonic sinusoidal output voltage waveform. E class inverter operation was selected to perform the ballast due to it has benefits of high efficiency and low harmonic distortion at output voltage waveform that is be better than the general square waveform electronics ballast, which has high harmonics voltage distortion. Circuit implementation of the ballast consists of an input inductor, an active switch device, and a series L-C resonant circuit. The ballast output voltage was oscillated as high frequency sinusoidal voltage waveform due to operation of the L-C resonant circuit that connected to fluorescent lamp. The active switch device was controlled by fixed duty ratio and switching frequency PWM controller. The control circuit was done by using a simple well-known PWM controller IC number SG3524. To verify the resonant ballast design, the circuit experimentation of 10Watts of electronic resonant ballast was applied. From the result, the 12 VDC from battery was generated to be 165 VAC of high frequency sinusoidal voltage waveform, low harmonic voltage, at 50 kHz for 10 Watts fluorescent lamp ignition.