Improved power converter for pulsed operation of DBD

摘要

In this paper an electronic ballast for pulsed operation of dielectric barrier discharges (DBD) is presented. The converter is designed as a transformer coupled square wave power source optimized for capacitive loads like DBD. The special features are the bipolar trapezoid waveform with variable slew rate (dU/dt), duty cycle, frequency and amplitude of the output voltage, which is balanced to ground. The power stage is designed in zero voltage switching technology. The ballast is primarily designed to investigate the discharge characteristics of DBD in dependence on the waveform parameters. A simple electrical DBD model is presented, which allows to predict the external DBD voltage and the discharge power in dependence of slew rate and duty cycle. The paper is closed with some experimental results of pulse XeCl*-excimer lamps.