Author Topic: МЭЛЗ ДРЛ 500 M (MELZ DRL 500 M)  (Read 1368 times)
Olav
Member
***
Offline

Gender: Male
View Posts
View Gallery


Olav Kettner
МЭЛЗ ДРЛ 500 M (MELZ DRL 500 M) « on: August 24, 2022, 04:21:48 AM » Author: Olav
Hello everyone,

today I would like to introduce a special mv lamp.
This type was produced by the MELZ company in Moscow from 1956 to 1971.
The special thing about this type of lamp is the lack of ignition electrodes.
I don't yet know why mv lamps were built without ignition electrodes.

Ignition must be carried out with an ignition device via the main electrodes.

This post contains photos of the lamp, a data sheet and an excerpt from a Russian book Применение газоразрядных источников света (Application of gas-discharge light sources).

The lamp in the photo was manufactured in September 1970.



















You can practically only compare the lamps with 400W and 1000W directly. It can be seen that the luminous flux of the TYPE DRL M is lower.
I would be very interested in the reasons why these lamps were produced in the first place. I have a guess, but it has not been proven.


There is a detailed text on this topic in Russian. The text explains why there were these DRL lamps without ignition electrodes.

The following translation is translated with Google only. It probably also contains errors.
The translation is sufficient for a general understanding of the connections in this lamp development.

================================================================================================================================
DRL in the Soviet Union and Russia

Few of us sometimes, but thought - but in fact, how they came to do DRL.
Even fewer wondered when and how these lamps began to be made in our country. Let's try to dot all the

The year is 1956 - at the Moscow Electric Lamp Plant for 10 years they have been successfully making fluorescent lamps (it is possible that it could not have done without foreign "help").
There is not enough capacity, so in Smolensk, Poltava, Yerevan and Saransk, a couple of years later, construction and commissioning of new lamp industry enterprises begin.
But it was in 1956 that the production of high-pressure arc lamps with a phosphor coating began in Moscow.

Let's go back to history. The first high pressure lamps were developed in the late 1930s, but they did not have an isothermal bulb,
no phosphor coating - a quartz burner placed in a classic "A" standard flask. Then there was the war, and developments in the field of lighting essentially stopped.
The first lamps coated with a light-diffusing composition can be dated to the late 1940s.
But as we all know, mercury basically emits in the blue-green part of the visible spectrum and in its ultraviolet region,
and is suitable in a “naked” form, except for lighting in cases where there are no requirements for color rendering.
The solution was quite simple and elegant - to cover the outer protective bulb of the lamp with a phosphor,
capable of correcting the color of the glow by introducing the red line of the spectrum into it.
After all, the main luminous flux of the lamp is created directly by the arc in the burner, and the phosphor is needed only to give the light an acceptable color rendering.

But it is not enough to cover the lamp bulb with a phosphor - you need to ensure maximum stability of the parameters during the entire operation of the lamp.
Therefore, phosphors were developed on the basis of rare earth metals and had to be heat-resistant,
resistant to the action of hard ultraviolet abundantly emitted by the burner. This is how the isothermal flask was born - a flask of a special shape,
in which the maximum convection of gases would be provided, to prevent overheating of individual sections and for more uniform wear of the phosphor.

Now let's talk about the design of the burner itself - it was required to be resistant to pressure increase due to the high temperature of the internal environment,
because initially in the off lamp the pressure is equal to atmospheric. Quartz was the ideal material. The electrodes also had to be resistant to wear.
Electrodes are generally a separate “song” - finding a material of the same thermal expansion with quartz was a severe headache.
But besides that, it was necessary to organize a solder of an igniting electrode, which ionizes the discharge gap, in order to successfully start the lamp from the mains voltage.
For otherwise, a high-voltage pulse is needed to breakdown the gas gap.

In parallel with the lamps, ballast devices were invented - chokes, capable of providing the rated current in the lamp throughout its entire period of operation,
for all discharge lamps have a negative current-voltage characteristic. And this means that the current in the discharge gap will grow to a conditionally unlimited value,
which will destroy the device. More precisely, chokes for fluorescent lamps have been improved.

And so we smoothly approached where we started - the Soviet Union always copied its products from strangers - it's easier, especially in the conditions of post-war instability that lasted until the 1960s.
And with gas-discharge lamps the story was the same.

Experience in the production of mercury lamps in the USSR was limited to copies of foreign medium-pressure lamps under the names IGAR and IGAR-2 and the semi-mythical SVD-250, as well as medical lamps.
But if refractory borosilicate glass was used in medium-pressure lamps, in which it was difficult but possible to make an ignition electrode, then quartz at that time was produced in the form of lamps of the PRK series.
And, as you know, they did not need an ignition electrode - they were triggered by an EMF pulse that arose in the throttle as a result of short circuiting it.
Faced with such a problem, it was decided to create a lamp similar to the PRK, but placed in an external flask. Two-electrode DRL.
And for the breakdown of the gas gap, make a special throttle with a triggering device called PURL.
The power line was represented by lamps for 250, 500, 750 and 1000 watts.
At that time, there were no special luminaires with built-in chokes,
and it was difficult to imagine lampposts in the style of Stalinist neoclassicism with neopon.


================================================================================================================================



Regards

Olav
« Last Edit: August 25, 2022, 10:22:44 AM by Olav » Logged
Andy
Member
***
Offline

Gender: Male
View Posts
View Gallery


Re: МЭЛЗ ДРЛ 500 M (MELZ DRL 500 M) « Reply #1 on: September 02, 2022, 01:38:25 PM » Author: Andy
Thanks Olav for taking the time to upload this information regarding such a rather unique type and wattage of MV lamp!
Logged

I'm always interested in exchanging lamps with others. Send me a message if you would be interested in a trade. :)

Print 
© 2005-2024 Lighting-Gallery.net | SMF 2.0.19 | SMF © 2021, Simple Machines | Terms and Policies