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An electrical ballast is a device that is connected in series with a load to regulate the amount of current flowing through it.

The inductive ballast used in fluorescent lights to control current through the tube, which would otherwise increase to a destructive level owing to the negative differential resistance of the tube’s voltage-current characteristic, is a well-known and commonly used example.

The intricacy of ballasts varies tremendously. They can be as basic as a resistor, inductor, or capacitor (or a combination of these) linked in series with the lamp, or as complicated as the electronic ballasts used in CFLs and HID lights (HID lamps).

To power discharge lights, an electronic ballast employs solid state electronic circuitry to provide the correct starting and operating electrical conditions. An electronic ballast can be smaller and lighter than a magnetic ballast of comparable rating. A magnetic ballast, which emits a line-frequency hum due to vibration of the core laminations, is generally quieter than an electronic ballast.

Switched-mode power supplies (SMPS) are commonly used in electronic ballasts, which correct the incoming power before chopping it at a high frequency. Dimming using pulse-width modulation or altering the frequency to a greater value may be possible with advanced electronic ballasts. Remote control and monitoring through networks such as LonWorks, Digital Addressable Lighting Interface (DALI), DMX512, Digital Serial Interface (DSI), or basic analog control utilizing a 0-10 V DC brightness control signal are possible with digital ballasts. The use of a wireless mesh network to manage the light level has been introduced.

Electronic ballasts often provide electricity to the lamp at a frequency of 20,000 Hz or more, rather than the mains frequency of 50″60 Hz, which reduces the stroboscopic effect of flicker, which is caused by the line frequency associated with fluorescent lighting (see photosensitive epilepsy). An electronic ballast’s high output frequency refreshes the phosphors of a fluorescent light so quickly that there is no discernible flicker. The flicker index, which is used to measure detectable light modulation, ranges from 0.00 to 1.00, with 0 denoting the least chance of flickering and 1 denoting the most. Magnetic ballast lamps have a flicker index of 0.04″0.07, while digital ballast lamps have a flicker index of less than 0.01.

Above roughly 10 kHz, the lamp works at about 9% higher effectiveness because more gas remains ionized in the arc stream. Lamp efficiency starts to rise about 10 kHz and continues to rise until around 20 kHz. In several Canadian provinces, electronic ballast retrofits to existing street lights were tried in 2012; since then, LED retrofits have grown increasingly widespread.

Electronic ballasts offer improved system efficacy for low pressure lamps like fluorescent lights due to the higher efficiency of the ballast itself and the higher bulb efficacy at higher frequency. Higher frequency does not enhance lamp effectiveness for HID lamps, but higher frequency reduces ballast losses and light degradation, meaning the bulb generates more light during its whole lifetime. Some HID lamp types, such as the ceramic discharge metal halide lamp, have lower reliability when operated at high frequencies in the 20″200 kHz range; for these lamps, a square wave low frequency current drive with a frequency in the range of 100″400 Hz is typically used, with the same advantage of lower light depreciation.

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