Investigating the characteristics of the commercial gas tube ‘S10 Starter’ using a time-delay measuring method

Abstract

The results of the commercial gas discharge tube investigation (starter ‘S10 Philips’), using the time-delay measuring method, are presented in this paper. This gas discharge tube is usually used as a starter, that is, for electrode heating regularization in fluorescent tubes. The measurements of time delay are performed for different voltages (from 210 V to 400 V) and different relaxation times (from 1 ms to 3 s). The obtained memory curves show that the used gas discharge tube has a very small memory effect, which indicates a fast response after a long (out-of-use) time. This characteristic of the used commercial gas discharge tube is a consequence of gas tube geometry. It also shows that the time-delay distributions for small relaxation time values have a Gaussian shape; with the increase in relaxation time the right tail of distributions increases and distributions lose symmetry and become exponential.