Measuring the pressure in ultrahigh-pressure mercury arcs

Abstract

Ultrahigh-pressure (UHP) mercury lamps are important as high-brightness light sources for digital projection. Hg pressures are usually above 20 MPa and difficult to measure. We have built special UHP lamps with a liquid Hg condensate in a temperature-controlled reservoir, allowing us to tune the Hg vapor pressure p between 14 and 30 MPa. As a simple measure for p, we recorded the width Δλ of the 546 nm Hg line while varying p and also the lamp current I and voltage U. The data define a function p(Δλ,I,U) that will deliver p to better than 3% from simple measurements of Δλ, I, and U for most UHP lamps in the important 100–200 W power range. The method is applied to sample lamps, yielding pressures up to 26 MPa and demonstrating how filled Hg amount, burning position, arc gap, and lamp power affect the pressure. The effective temperature of typical UHP lamps is found to be 2400 K. We also derive an improved characteristic U(d,p,I) for the dependence of the arc voltage on arc gap, pressure, and current for e...