ABSTRACT
Universite Paul Sabatier, Centre de physique des Plasmas et de leurs Applications de Toulouse CPAT, 118 route de Narbonne, 31062 Toulouse cedex 4
Contact . busoAcpat.ups-tlsefr
1.Introduction
Electronic ballasts are more and more used in fluorescent lamps lighting. Providing new functionalities like dimming or instant start, electronic ballasts enhance user comfort. Furthermore, on an environmental point of view, they are energy saving. With these new possibilities, more and more interest is devoted to global lighting management systems. Lamp lifetime is an important issue among the large amount of problems that rose up in this approach. Indeed, if the management system or the ballast is not correctly designed this could lead to premature lamp failure due to electrode erosion and/or sputtering, and even to electrode fracture in some cases. So it's important to know how the electrode behaves in nominal operation mode and far away from it. This paper reports a first attempt of the fluorescent lamp cathode modeling, dealing with both aspects, glow to arc transition [3] and steady state behavior [1,2,4].
