General Electric Company

William M Rucki

Spiro Vamvakas

Karl Stuermer

A power supply for a metal halide discharge lamp includes a circuit for applying a high voltage starting pulse to the arc tube of the lamp to initiate the discharge, a glow transition current to provide power transitioning the arc tube from its glow to its run mode, and a run power supply circuit to provide continuous controlled d-c current to the arc tube.

Operating circuit for a direct current discharge lamp

An electrical load controller includes a combination of switches for selecting a desired load output level, an electronic custom gate array for converting the switch signals to a parallel binary number, a parallel to serial data encoder for converting the multi-bit parallel data signal into a multi-bit serial data signal, a frequency shift key connected to a resonant circuit generating a controllable high frequency signal and for shifting the high frequency either up or down from the center frequency coupled to a power line to transmit the binary serial data onto the power line. The system also includes a fail-safe construction so that, should the control system fail, the load will be operable. The system provides continuous communication from the controller to the power line, so that should noise interfere with one data transmission, subsequent data transmission will provide correct data to the load, thereby making load control nearly immune to extraneous noise on the power line.

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Euclid, OH, United States of America

William M Rucki