Friday, May 10, 2013

More on Early Power Supply Preregulator Circuits


In my last posting “Ferroresonant Transformers as Preregulators in Early DC Power Supplies “, I introduced the concept of preregulators as a means of improving the efficiency of power supplies.  While a linear regulator provides excellent performance as a power supply, it has to dissipate all the additional power resulting from the voltage drop across it as it takes up the difference between the output voltage setting and the unregulated DC voltage at its input. This voltage difference becomes quite large for high-line AC input voltage levels, as well as low DC output voltage settings when the power supply has an adjustable output. A linear power supply becomes quite inefficient and physically large, having to dissipate a lot of power in comparison to what it provides at its output.  A preregulator helps to mitigate this disadvantage while still retaining the performance advantages of a linear output stage.

The ferroresonant transformer was a clever device and was an effective means of compensating for variance in the AC input voltage, but its output was fixed so it did not do anything for compensating for low DC output voltage settings when the power supply had an adjustable output.  A far more common type of preregulator circuit often used was an SCR preregulator circuit, depicted in Figure 1.


Figure 1: Constant voltage power supply with SCR preregulator

The SCR is a four layer diode structure. Unlike a conventional diode it does not conduct in the forward direction until a signal current is applied to its gate input. It then latches on and remains conducting in its forward direction. It does so until the forward bias voltage is removed or reversed and it resets. In the reverse direction it is the same as a conventional diode.  By replacing two of the conventional diodes in the full wave diode bridge with SCRs as shown in Figure 1, the DC voltage feeding into the linear regulator output stage can now be preregulated.  The preregulator control circuit senses the voltage across the series linear regulator output stage. For each half cycle of the line frequency it adjusts the firing angle of the SCRs in order to adjust the DC voltage at the input of the linear regulator so that the voltage across the linear regulator remains constant, compensating for the load and output voltage level setting accordingly. Figure 2 shows how changing the firing angle of the SCRs changes the output voltage and current delivered by the SCR preregulator circuit.


Figure 2: SCR firing angle control of the preregulator’s output

In all, an SCR preregulated power supply with a linear output stage provided a good balance of efficiency, performance, and cost making its topology well suited for DC power supplies for a variety of lab and industrial applications for the time.  Still, time marches on and high frequency switching-based topologies have come to dominate for the most part, due to a number of advantages they bring. As a matter of fact it is not uncommon today to find a switching power supply serving as a preregulator as well!


Reference: Agilent Technologies DC Power Supply Handbook, application note AN-90B, part number 5952-4020 “Click here to access”

5 comments:

  1. Doesn't using a SMPS as the pre-regulator introduce switching noise into the circuit - even post linear regulator?

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  2. Yes, a SMPS can introduce switching noise into the circuit. Good filtering techniques will minimize the noise. For the pre-regulator circuit above, the switching is low frequency which is very easy to deal with and the linear post regulator is also very effective at rejecting these lower frequencies.

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    1. Thanks for the reply. Is there a more modern technique for building the pre-regulator with low frequency switching? I think the E3634 uses some sort of IC to control the phase of the switching, and a power MOSFET for the actual pre-regulator switch. Is that a typical technique, or something that's not used much anymore?

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  3. I will trust you are correct on how the E5634 is implemented. I am not familiar with its design. That does sound like a reasonable approach to implementing a more updated pre-regulator design. I think using a conventional high frequency switching power supply with power factor correction tends to be the more common approach these days. This latter approach also gives you a universal line frequency input as well. You just need to be more diligent on controlling and filtering noise.

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