Abstract: A lamp electronic ballast with a piezoelectric cooling fan. Use of ballast-driven lamps is limited in some lighting applications by thermal considerations. For example, the problem of heat removal from compact fluorescent lamps with integrated ballasts has limited their use. Similarly, the use of ballast-driven fluorescent lighting in high hat and other closed luminaire applications has been limited by thermal considerations. Thermal management of ballasts for such thermally sensitive applications is provided by a piezoelectric fan integrated with the ballast. The power to drive the fan may be obtained from the same AC line input that supplies the ballast, or from an AC ripple voltage present at the output of a rectifier in the ballast, or from the output of the ballast to the lamp, or from any suitable circuit location in the ballast. The fan maybe a membrane-type spot-cooler comprising a thin membrane carried by a frame mounted adjacent a hot spot.

Abstract: Anodized aluminum anode and cathode foils are interleaved in a stack separated by spacers saturated with electrolyte in an enclosure. The anode foils and cathode foils have tabs which protrude from the housing and are cold welded to leads outside the housing, where they are not exposed to electrolyte. This permits using copper leads, which can be soldered to traces on a printed circuit board. A flat capacitor can be fixed underneath a PCB or even used as the substrate for a circuit, resulting in high volume efficiencies and the possibility of using it as a heat sink for other components.