42.60.Jf Beam characteristics: profile, intensity, and power; spatial pattern formation
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With the growing importance of advanced lighting technologies, customers expect additional functionality and higher comfort from fluorescent lamps. However, the ability to regulate light intensity (dimmed operation), in particular, exerts enormous stress on fluorescent lamps’ electrodes, leading to increased electrode erosion and significantly reduced lifetimes. During the operation of a fluorescent lamp, free barium (the main compound of the electrode emitter) is produced at the electrode responsible for lowering the work function in order to enable energy-efficient and durable electrodes with lifetimes of up to 20,000 hours. Despite their relatively long lifetimes, electrodes remain the lifetime-limiting factor of a fluorescent lamp. Therefore, for practical applications (e.g., maintaining quality control, adjusting operational parameters, and evaluating new electrode designs), electrode erosion is of special interest. The actual erosion-measurement methods determine a time-averaged erosion level over several hundred operation hours. Thus, a quasi-instantaneous measuring method (short measurement) is still necessary to determine erosion during operation. Such a method would allow us to compare erosion under different discharge conditions (currents, frequencies, or heating currents) from the same electrode in the same lamp. This work focuses on the determination of absolute electrode erosion during the stationary operation of commonly used fluorescent lamps. Commercial T8 lamps (fluorescent lamps with a diameter of 8/8 inch) are investigated at the operating mode of commonly used electronic ballasts with frequencies of several kHz. Operations under standard and dimmed conditions with an additional heating current to reduce electrode erosion are investigated. Electrode erosion is characterized by the erosion of barium, the main compound of the electrode. Therefore, laser-induced fluorescence (LIF), which is the most sensitive method for this application, is applied to determine the absolute densities of the eroded barium in the electrode region. These densities are affected by the plasma in the electrode region and do not directly represent the absolute barium erosion. To overcome this limitation, a new method based on a special measurement technique in combination with a barium-diffusion-model is developed to determine the absolute barium erosion based on the measured densities. It has been found that the barium densities in the electrode region are lower than the equilibrium pressures produced by the reduction of the barium oxide. This could be caused either by a reduced reaction rate, the reduced diffusion of the reactant (primarily barium oxide) or by reduced barium transport through the porous emitter. However, these results suggest that barium erosion depends on temperature and emitter structure, which vary over an electrode’s lifetime. For currents significantly higher than the nominal lamp current, a drastic increase in emitter evaporation is found. Such, an increase in the lamp current from 300 mA to 500 mA leads to an increase in emitter evaporation by a factor of five. Using the lamp for a long period of time under these conditions therefore reduces the lifetime by a factor of five. Notably, at this dramatically increased erosion level, the hot spot temperature only increases from 1120 K to 1170 K. Investigation of various frequencies from 50 Hz to 5 kHz revealed no significant dependence of emitter evaporation on frequency.
A fluorescent lamp driven with an 'instant start electronic control gear' starts in a glow mode. In the glow mode, which lasts typically for tens of milliseconds, the cathode fall exceeds hundreds of volts. This causes high energy ion bombardment of the electrode which heats the electrode, and induces a transition from glow to arc mode. In the arc mode the electrode emits thermionically and the cathode fall drops to the 12 – 15 V range. Unfortunately, the high energy ion bombardment during the glow mode leads also to intense sputtering of electrode material, including tungsten as well as emitter. Thus, instant started fluorescent lamps often suffer from early failures due to coil fracture. Therefore, the investigation of tungsten erosion during instant start is necessary and was the main goal of this work.
The density of neutral atomic tungsten is determined by laser-induced fluorescence (LIF) and optical emission spectroscopy measurements (OES). Investigations are performed on a low-pressure argon dc discharge and on commercial fluorescent lamps. To include the entire temperature profile along the electrode the diffuse and spot operation modes of the dc lamp are studied experimentally and theoretically. The measured dependencies of the cathode temperature along the coil on the discharge and heating parameters are compared with the calculated results. For the first time the tungsten erosion during instant start of commercial fluorescent lamps was experimentally investigated in this work. The erosion process could be related to sputtering. A reconstruction of the temporal evolution of the absolute tungsten population density of the ground state during the glow mode was presented. The sputtered tungsten density increases immediately with the ignition, reaches a maximum where the discharge contracts at the end of the glow mode, and decreases some milliseconds before the glow-to-arc transition takes place. The maximum tungsten density was observed within a region of a few hundred micrometers only located at the discharge attachment point. The main result achieved in this work is that during the whole glow mode tungsten is sputtered. Therefore, the lifetime of instant started fluorescent lamps can be enhanced by reducing the duration of the glow mode. Additionally, the need for the application of different types of diagnostics for the observation of lamp ignition was shown due to different results of LIF, AAS and OES: The observation of excited tungsten atoms by OES shows the maximum emission signal at the glow-to-arc transition whereas by LIF and AAS measurements of tungsten atoms in the ground state the maximum density is found during the whole glow mode. This can be explained by the fact that the intensity of the spontaneous emitted light is related not only to the density but also to the degree of excitation.