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ELECTRONIC BALLAST Electrical ballast is a device intended to limit the amount of current in an electric circuit.

Ballasts vary greatly in complexity. They can be as simple as a series resistor as commonly used with small neon lamps or light-emitting diodes (LEDs), for high power installations the reactance of inductors, capacitors, or both are used to reduce the power dissipation. Finally, ballasts can be as complex as the computerized, remote-controlled electronic ballasts now often used with fluorescent lamps. Ballasts stabilize the current through an electrical load. These are most often used when an electrical circuit or device were connected to a constant-supply voltage presents a negative (differential) resistance, it would draw an increasing amount of current until it was destroyed or caused the power supply to fail. To prevent this, ballast provides a positive resistance or reactance that limits the ultimate current to an appropriate level. In this way, the ballast provides for the proper operation of the negative-resistance device by appearing to be a legitimate, stable resistance in the circuit. Ballasts can also be used simply to deliberately reduce the current in an ordinary, positiveresistance circuit, and in automobile ignition systems commonly included a ballast resistor to regulate the voltage applied to the ignition system A ballast resistor compensates for normal or incidental changes in the physical state of a system. It may be a fixed or variable resistor. In some old AC/DC receivers (universal sets), the vacuum tube the voltage drop across all the filaments in series is sometimes less than the full mains voltage, it was often necessary to get rid of the excess voltage. A ballast resistor was often used for this purpose, as it was cheap and worked with both AC and DC.

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