Design Notes – Power Electronics – 02

Power Supplies and SMPS, Transformers, Drive circuits for Motors, Heaters and Solenoids are all Power Electronics. Thyristors, Mosfets and High Power Transistors are important components used in these circuits.

Tek Power Supply Facia – Observe the user friendly interface design.

Power Design Points to note – delabs

• Foldback circuits in the form of constant current or voltage can protect a Power Circuit from overload. eg. Charger.
• Air gap in inductor core prevents saturation of the Magnetics, it must be made like that when required. eg. Choke.
• High power equipment should have a soft start, so that fuses dont blow on start, inrush can cause damage to parts.
• Caps can be put in series to double voltage withstand capability, when we put el-caps in series they have to be identical in value. put caps in parallel to increase the cap uF value and it also lowers ESR which is equivalent series resistance, this is good when filtering in SMPS. Two el-caps with the negatives of both connected and the positive terminals serving as the two terminals will give a non-polar cap, used in crossover networks.
• When smps has to work at 100Khz or more, the primary of transformer must have multiple strands, and secondary can be a copper flat ribbon. this is due to skin effect, as high frequency current flows on surface of conductor.
• MOSFET needs a turn on pulse and a turn off pulse as gate capacitance is huge.
• Do not club Heatsinks unless the heatsink is very big or the clubbed components form a part of a current sharing set. If you club say two TO220 devices one dissipating 10W with a 2 Watt heating device, you may reduce reliability of the 2W device. Then clubbing parallel current sharing devices on one heatsink may be a good idea as it may reduce thermal runaway, also parallel power transistors should each have 0.1E in emitter path, this also can force load sharing on lazy devices.
• Test a mosfet, charge the gate with the DMM in diode mode, then there is a short between source and drain.
• Snubbers consisting of R-C should be used across switches, relay contacts, MOSFETS when switching inductive loads, this will absorb the spike and save the device.
• Transformers used in SMPS could be split bobbin for product safety, and transformers should be resin impregnated, hazard may arise when using a badly made product.
• In a SMPS which is not earthed the floating (unconnected) earth terminal will give a slight shock due to the two Y caps connected to earth from phase and neutral.
• Power mosfets, transistors or IGBT’s should be electrically isolated very well from heatsink with alumina, mica or silpad. It could withstand 2KV -5KV DC, related to product safety. Also these heatsinks should not be earthed but floating, do not fix to the metal chassis for maximum safety.