Author Topic: 1000 watt Mercury Vapor OCV  (Read 3262 times)
Keyless
Member
***
Offline

View Posts
View Gallery

1000 watt Mercury Vapor OCV « on: March 14, 2019, 03:42:16 PM » Author: Keyless
Why do 1000 watt Mercury vapor lamps need a 480 volt OCV and run about 200-220 volts? How would efficiency and lumens change if the arc tube was designed for 240 volt OCV and about 120 running volts? 
Logged
Medved
Member
*****
Offline

Gender: Male
View Posts
View Gallery

Re: 1000 watt Mercury Vapor OCV « Reply #1 on: March 15, 2019, 05:37:58 AM » Author: Medved
There is a fixed voltage drop at the electrodes, which does not produce any light. This drop is about 15..20V and it does not depend on the total arc voltage. Because it does not generate any light, it just causes losses.

With 120V arc lamp this drop is responsible for 15..20% losses, with a 240V arc these losses become just 7.5..10%.

Now you may ask, why the lower wattage lamps are not designed with higher arc voltage? There the thing is, the higher voltage means longer arc. When targeting some exact power, the longer arc means lower arc loading. You may make the arc shorter for the same voltage by rising the operating pressure, but that means the thing has to operate at higher temperature, so more power becomes lost by the thermal radiation of the arc tube body. And that means other kind of losses, plus engineering difficulties to make the thing reliable enough.
So there is a kind of optimum arc voltage: If youdesign the arc voltage too low, the electrode drop losses kill the efficacy, when too high the low arc loading and the other losses kills it.
That is the reason, why the US HPS lamps have each wattage different arc voltage (S56 and above): The specs were designed so you get maximum efficacy from the given power rating.
Now in real life the lamp alone is not the only thing having losses. The big loss contributor is the ballast.
And there it makes significant difference, how complex the ballast has to be.
The minimum losses are with the simplest series reactor ballast. But this ballast style has fixed OCV (the input mains), so it limits the usable lamp arc voltage to about half of that.
Because the mains is fixed, it is the lamp design, which has to be tweaked to suit the series reactor.

The MV specs came from the 30's from the UK, where the 240V mains pretty well matched the optimum for the 250..400W rated MVs.
Plus the fact the efficacy vs design arc voltage is quite flat with MV concept, all MVs were designed around a series choke characteristics on 2xxV supply.

This works well for all wattages up to 400W. For 1kW and above the 120V arc voltage becomes more away from the optimum, plus the arc current of 10A becomes quite a stretch for normal installation, so with larger array the installation would be more likely connected to all three phases.
That brings other problems: When compensated fixtures are connected into "Y" (so when fed by 230V) and the common Neutral breaks, all the installation uses to go crazy, with spot overloading and similar problems due to series LC (ballasts and their compensation capacitors) tuned to the 50Hz forming in the system. To fix these problems, the compensation capacitors have to be removed from the individual fixtures ans replaced by capacitors connected in "D" across the phases.
But with a 3-phase installation, there is very convenient way to connect the load between two phases, so to across the 400V (corresponds to 230V phase voltage). This means there is no Neutral problem anymore, just the feed becomes higher voltage.
But as written above, the 1kW and above would actually benefit from higher arc voltage (closer to the efficacy optimum), so these wattages were made designed with higher arc voltages (200..240V), to suit the 400V "across two phases" feed.

As far as I know, the 1kW were sold both with 140V (for 230V feed), as well as with 240V (for 400V feed) versions, the 2kW were only 240V arc (so for 400V feed).

For US environment all MVs need an (auto)transformer ballast anyway, so so no benefit from the lower arc voltage, so the more efficient higher voltage version was primarily marketed there, I don't know if the 140V 1kW has its ANSI code ever assigned.

Logged

No more selfballasted c***

Keyless
Member
***
Offline

View Posts
View Gallery

Re: 1000 watt Mercury Vapor OCV « Reply #2 on: March 15, 2019, 04:49:17 PM » Author: Keyless
Makes perfect sense now! :)


Quote
For US environment all MVs need an (auto)transformer ballast anyway, so so no benefit from the lower arc voltage, so the more efficient higher voltage version was primarily marketed there, I don't know if the 140V 1kW has its ANSI code ever assigned.


I want to say I politely beg to differ.  ;) I know of plenty of installations where 100-400 watt lamps were fed with 240 volts and used a reactor ballast and tons of old 1000 watt industrial fixtures were fed at 480 volts also taking a reactor ballast.

Lag ballasts covered 120 volt applications. CWA in street light because it could tolerate more voltage drop and the starting current was less then the operating current which was great for circuits with tons of fixtures on them. 



At 1000 watts a coated mercury vapor puts out as much light as 400 watt probe start Metal Halide lamp, aprox 38,000 lumens. Thats why 400 watts caught on so quick for high bays aftwards from my understanding, and then of course you had the 350 and 320 pulse start versions which matched the same light output for the 400 watt probe starts.


How do the lumens and life differ for the 140 vs 240 arc votlage? Any pics of the arc tubes? I've only ever seen the 240 volt versions.   
Logged
joseph_125
Member
*****
Offline

Gender: Male
View Posts
View Gallery


GoL
Re: 1000 watt Mercury Vapor OCV « Reply #3 on: March 15, 2019, 10:16:49 PM » Author: joseph_125
There were two variants of 1kW mercury lamps made. The H36 is the more commonly seen and used one which had a 260v arc voltage and a lamp current of 4.2A and was designed for autotransformer gear or reactor gear running on 480v. The less common H34 version had a 130v arc voltage and 8.1A lamp current. It didn't see much use as the main gear it was intended to run on 240v reactor gear. I'm not sure if autotransformer based gear (for operation on 120v circuits) was made for H34 lamps as the H36 lamp was slightly more efficient and since you needed a autotransformer anyway on 120v you might as well use the more efficient one.

As for lumen ratings, the H36/DX lamps are rated at 60500 lumens while the H34/DX is rated at 55000 lumens. Both of these are initial values. I wasn't able to find a good shot of the arc tube of a H34 lamp on this site.
Logged
Keyless
Member
***
Offline

View Posts
View Gallery

Re: 1000 watt Mercury Vapor OCV « Reply #4 on: March 15, 2019, 10:19:12 PM » Author: Keyless
60,000 vs 55,000 ain't to bad.


And I stand corrected, its 20,000 more lumens.
Logged
Keyless
Member
***
Offline

View Posts
View Gallery

Re: 1000 watt Mercury Vapor OCV « Reply #5 on: April 02, 2019, 04:52:57 AM » Author: Keyless
There were two variants of 1kW mercury lamps made. The H36 is the more commonly seen and used one which had a 260v arc voltage and a lamp current of 4.2A and was designed for autotransformer gear or reactor gear running on 480v. The less common H34 version had a 130v arc voltage and 8.1A lamp current. It didn't see much use as the main gear it was intended to run on 240v reactor gear. I'm not sure if autotransformer based gear (for operation on 120v circuits) was made for H34 lamps as the H36 lamp was slightly more efficient and since you needed a autotransformer anyway on 120v you might as well use the more efficient one.

As for lumen ratings, the H36/DX lamps are rated at 60500 lumens while the H34/DX is rated at 55000 lumens. Both of these are initial values. I wasn't able to find a good shot of the arc tube of a H34 lamp on this site.


Found a good reference for the H36 and H34 on page 16:


https://a89b8e4143ca50438f09-7c1706ba3fabeeda794725d88e4f5e57.ssl.cf2.rackcdn.com/spec_sheets/files/000/013/516/original/GE-Hid-Lamps.pdf?1440211339
Logged
WorldwideHIDCollectorUSA
Member
*****
Offline

Gender: Male
View Posts
View Gallery

HID, LPS, and preheat fluorescents forever!!!!!!


Worldwide HIDCollectorUSA
Re: 1000 watt Mercury Vapor OCV « Reply #6 on: August 24, 2021, 03:36:25 AM » Author: WorldwideHIDCollectorUSA

“For US environment all MVs need an (auto)transformer ballast anyway, so so no benefit from the lower arc voltage, so the more efficient higher voltage version was primarily marketed there, I don't know if the 140V 1kW has its ANSI code ever assigned.
[/quote]”

@Medved, as joseph_125 said, there are some cases in which a mercury vapor lamp can satisfactorily operate on a simple reactor/choke ballast in a North American country because not all lighting in North America runs on 120v or 127v mains supplies because there are some situations in which lighting runs on higher mains voltage supplies such as 208v, 220v, 240v, 254v, 277v, 347v, 440v, 480v, and 600v in rare cases. Please be warned that you should not assume that all countries use only one AC mains voltage for all their lighting like the US only running on 120v mains or European countries only using 230v.
Logged

Desire to collect various light bulbs (especially HID), control gear, and fixtures from around the world.

DISCLAIMER: THE EXPERIMENTS THAT I CONDUCT INVOLVING UNUSUAL LAMP/BALLAST COMBINATIONS SHOULD NOT BE ATTEMPTED UNLESS YOU HAVE THE PROPER KNOWLEDGE. I AM NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR ANY INJURIES.

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