Testing Power Supply Compliance To Energy Efficiency Standards

Focus:

Over the last several years, leading worldwide standards organizations including the EPA’s Energy Star program, the European Commission’s Code of Conduct and the California Energy Commission (CEC) have defined new efficiency requirements for external power supplies. These standards demand that designers test their products for active-mode efficiency and no-load power consumption to high levels of accuracy. To help simplify that process and accelerate product development, this article describes a relatively straightforward way to measure compliance to these evolving energy efficiency standards and offers a few testing tips. Tests described here for measuring active mode and no-load efficiency require a wattmeter, a programmable ac source, an electronic load, and two digital multimeters (one must be a high-resolution ammeter.) Issues discussed here include the standards’ requirements for test accuracy, proper configuration of test equipment, calculation of integral input power, the order of measurements, use of PI’s compliance calculator tool, and calculation of efficiency by hand.

What you’ll learn:

• How to accurately measure and calculate active-mode efficiency and no-load power consumption of external power supplies to verify compliance with energy efficiency standards

Notes:

Also, see Power Integration's video, "Testing Compliance to Energy Efficiency Standards," a summary of which can be found in this Design Guide by going to Advanced Search, then Popular Topics, and selecting “Energy Efficiency.” Or go directly to the video at http://www.powerint.com/en/pi-university/courses/testing-compliance-energy-efficiency-standards .

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Author & Publication:

Silvestro Fimiani, Power Integrations, San Jose, Calif., How2Power Today, Aug 30 2012

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