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Switching power supply


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http://www.romanblack.com/a04.htm
Add an extra transistor and you can have currewnt limiting, in fact if you removed the zener and set RS to the right value for the forward cuurent you want, you'll have a switching constant current source which would be ideal for powering high intensity white LEDs.

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Hi Ante,
That's a cool charge-pump circuit. ;D
The current through the zeners is about 20mA continuously, and the transistors will drop out of saturation if the total load current exceeds about 200mA for each transistor if they are weak.
Therefore the efficiency is about 95% before adding the 0.5V saturation loss of each transistor. ;D

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Hi Ante,
Sorry I didn't notice that your transistors are darlingtons. They don't look like darlingtons.
In a half-wave charge pump the transistors must conduct twice the load current, right?
For your 2.5A load, each darlington conducts 5A and its max saturation voltage is 2V. Therefore their max dissipation is 10W each for half the time which averages to 5W each continuously. Your darlingtons were probably better than minimum spec, and you were lucky. ;D

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Hi Audioguru,

Yes, I might have been lucky. Don’t you think the minimum specs are very rare? I think so because the manufacturers like to have a good margin to play with! Can you honestly say you have ever found any semiconductor with minimum spec? Well I haven’t not even close to minimum! Maybe back in the germanium days, when I built my first variable bench psu with an AD149 on the back! ;D  ;D


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Hi Ante,
I always design circuits using manufacturers' guaranteed minimum specs and everything works fine. ;D

I also still have my very first psu that has a BDY38 (I have its 1968 datasheet) silicon transistor replacing its original germanium AD149. I can hardly read the label on it since it is badly pitted from zapping shorted Ni-Cads. ;D

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Hi Audioguru,

I agree, caution is a virtue (better safe than sorry)! And I am sorry to have confused you with the wrong transistor symbols. At the time when I converted the old doodle to this drawing I couldn’t find the correct symbol for a darlington. Unfortunately I have lost my old psu along the way, 35 years is a long time for any psu! I still got my number two psu though; it has a 2SD92 on the back 0-20V@1A! :o


Alun,

Yes why not, go ahead make it more up to date and efficient!

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=Underdog=

Hello

I'm new to this board and My name is Peter, I found this thread in the google search engine, while searching something and I found this community and sounds  interesting.


Hopefully I can contribute something to the community though.

Wow nice,,, Thanks for sharing your knowledge Guys... God Bless

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