Using a DC Power Supply to Regulate Energy

In a previous 2-part posting I talked about what power and energy is (part 1 – energy) (part 2 – power).  It is pretty straight-forward thing to do to use a DC power supply for regulating voltage or current. Constant voltage (CV) and constant current (CC) regulation are standard features of most all DC power supplies used in testing. However, what if you have an unusual application calling for applying a fixed amount of energy to your device under test (DUT)? For example, adding a fixed amount of energy to a calorimeter or chemical process, or testing the must (or must not) tripping energy of a fuse, or circuit breaker, or squib or detonator perhaps?

When the resistance of a device remains constant, it is relatively straight-forward to apply a fixed amount of energy to a DUT. By applying a fixed voltage or current, the power in the DUT remains constant. Then the energy is simply:

E = (V²/R)_*t = (I²_*R)_*t

Where E is the energy in watt-seconds or joules, V is voltage in volts, R is resistance in ohms, I is the current in amps, and t is time in seconds. All you now need to do is apply the constant voltage or current for a pre-determined amount of time and you will then be delivering a fixed amount of energy to your DUT.

Many times however, a lot of DUTs do not maintain constant loading. The may have a dynamically varying loading by nature or its resistance dramatically increases as it heats up. How do you regulate a fixed amount of energy to your DUT under these circumstances? One possibility is to use one of a few specialized power supplies on the market can regulate their outputs with constant power. As the DUT’s loading decreases or increases the power supply will adjust its output accordingly in order to maintain a constant output power delivered to the DUT.  Again then, by applying this constant power for a pre-determined amount of time you will then be delivering a fixed amount of energy to your DUT.

Still, for DUTs that do not maintain constant loading, it is very often not desirable, or outright unacceptable, to apply constant power sourcing.. It may be you can only apply a fixed voltage or current to your DUT. What can you do for these circumstances? Time can no longer remain a fixed value when trying to regulate a fixed amount of energy. The solution becomes quite a bit more complex, as depicted in Figure 1.

Figure 1: Regulating a fixed amount of energy to a DUT

Putting the solution depicted in Figure 1 into practice can prove challenging. The watt-hour meter needs to provide a trigger out signal when the desired watt-hour (or watt-second) threshold level is reached. This becomes even more challenging if this response time required needs to be just fractions of a second for this set up. More than likely this may become a piece of customized hardware.

Interestingly this very set up can be programmatically configured within our N6900A and N7900A series Advanced Power System (APS) power supplies. These products have Amp-hour and Watt-hour measurement integrated into their measurement systems. Not only can you measure these parameters, there is a programmable way to act on them in a variety of ways as well, which is the expression signal routing. Logical expressions can be programmed and downloaded into APS, which then acts on them at hardware-level speeds.  Creating and loading the signal routing expression into the APS unit is simplified by using the N7906A Power Assistance software, which let me do it graphically, as shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2: Graphically developing and loading an energy limit setting into an Agilent APS unit

In Figure 2 a threshold comparator was set to generate a trigger output at a level of 0.0047 watt-hours. This trigger was then routed to the output transient system, to cause the output to transition to a new output level when triggered. I had entered in zero volts as the triggered output level. Thus when the watt-hour reading reached its trigger point, the output went to zero, cutting off any more power and energy from being delivered to the DUT.

The SCPI command set for this signal routing expression is also generated from this software utility by clicking on “SCPI to clipboard”. This saves on the effort generating the code manually if you are incorporating the expression into a larger test program. For this expression the code generated is:

:SENSe:THReshold1:FUNCtion WHOur

:SENSe:THReshold1:WHOur 0.0047

:SENSe:THReshold1:OPERation GT

:SYSTem:SIGNal:DEFine EXPRession1,"Thr1"

:TRIGger:TRANsient:SOURce EXPRession1

To test things out a 1.18 ohm resistive load was used to draw 84.75 watts for a 10 volt output setting. The output cut back to zero volts at nearly 200 milliseconds, as expected. This is shown in the oscilloscope capture in Figure 3.

Figure 3: APS output for an 84.75 watt load and energy limit set to 0.0047 watt-hours

The load power was then doubled by increasing the output voltage to 14.142 volts. The APS output cut back to zero volts in half the time, delivering the same amount of energy, as expected. This is depicted in the oscilloscope capture in Figure 4.

Figure 4: APS output for a 169.5 watt load and energy limit set to 0.0047 watt-hours

While using a resistor makes it easy to see that a set amount of energy is being delivered to the load. However, being able to act on a real time watt-hour energy measurement makes it very practical to do deliver a fixed amount of energy, regardless of the dynamic nature of the load over time.

Using the power supply status subsystem to improve your test throughput

Continuing on my throughput theme here, one recommendation is to take advantage of the power supply’s status subsystem. Some power supply operations take notably longer than most to complete than others. Two notable examples:

• Initializing a triggered measurement
• Initializing a triggered output transient or output list event

When developing programs you can include long, fixed wait statements to make certain these operations have completed before proceeding. However, this can easily add many tens of milliseconds or more of unnecessary waiting, increasing overall test time.  A better way is to take advantage of the DC power supply’s status subsystem features that eliminate unnecessary waiting for these operations.

Triggered measurement and output sourcing events can substantially speed up testing by providing actions tightly synchronized with other test activities. But they do have some up-front set up overhead time needed for initializing them. Instead of using a fixed programming delay following an initialization operation it is better to take advantage of the Operation Status Group register in the status subsystem, which is illustrated in Figure 1.

Figure 1: Agilent N6700 series DC power system operation status group

The “WTG meas” bit (#3) or “WTG trans bit (#4) in the condition register can be monitored with a loop in the test program to see when they turn true. At the moment the measurement or output sourcing event is initiated and ready for a trigger the test program will then proceed with its execution without incurring any unnecessary additional waiting. This saves a considerable amount of time as illustrated in Figure 2.

Figure 2: Operation-complete wait time distribution

Instead of waiting for the full worst-case each and every time, the wait is now just the actual time. When repeated over and over for all DUTs being tested, the net result is the average of the actual wait time, which in most cases is just a small fraction of the worst case time! The net result can be many tens of milliseconds test time savings, making an improvement in test throughput.

The first five hints of my compendium “10 Hints for Improving Throughput with your Power Supply” can be viewed here: (click here to access).  For those reading our “Watt’s Up?” blog here are getting the opportunity to preview one of the remaining 5 hints yet to be released!