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Start, run up and hot restrike of a G.E.C clear tubular mercury vapour lamp. Quite rare to find clear mercury vapour lamps but they are still available in the US and Japan. The lamp takes about 5 minutes to reach full output and if the arc is interrupted the lamp must cool down for about 7 minutes before the pressure in the arc tube drops low enough to re ignite.
22,000 lumens, 5800'k colour temperature and a life of 20,000 hours.
The hot restrike section of the video is a good demonstration of the starting electrodes used in these lamps.
When the lamp is energised the distance between the electrodes is so large that the full open circuit voltage is not high enough to cause ionisation of the gas filling. However the same voltage is also applied to an auxiliary starting electrode via a small resistor. The gap between these electrodes is much smaller, and the voltage gradient is sufficiently high that ionisation will occur. A small discharge strikes and once free electrons, ions and photons have been produced in the arc tube it is then very easy to strike an arc across the main electrodes. The discharge quickly makes this transition because it can then bypass the starting resistor, as there is no electrical resistance between the main electrodes.