Use Exponential Equations And A Simple Program To Solve Power Supply Problems

Focus:

Many physical processes in which some parameter changes value from one number to another will undergo transitions between those numbers which may be described by exponential equations. Temperature excursions in most electronic equipment often proceed that way. The coefficients of those equations can yield valuable insight into the underlying physical processes and can sometimes predict if a product will work properly or catastrophically fail. Unfortunately, the commercially available math software for doing that analysis can be a bit costly. But you can avoid that cost for some purposes with a little mathematics for which you can write your own code in a language of your choosing. In this article, the author presents a power supply case history in which a thermal runaway problem was diagnosed, a failure analysis was performed and a remedy was achieved—all using this analysis method.

What you’ll learn:

• How to diagnose and analyze thermally induced power supply failures using exponential equations and a simple program
• How to do curve fitting for exponential equations using GWBASIC or a programming language of your choice

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Author & Publication:

John Dunn, Ambertec, Merrick, New York, How2Power Today, Oct 27 2011

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