Using Duty Cycle To Detect Power Supply Overload (Part 2): A Practical Implementation

Focus:

Part 1 of this article introduced the concept of using the duty cycle of a power supply’s PWM control signal to detect and protect the power supply against overload and short circuit conditions. This part 2 explains what signals are needed to implement this method and how these signals are generated including what circuitry is needed. The key is generating a reference pulse train (the reference signal) whose duty cycle corresponds to an overload condition. As the author explains, a phase-discriminator built on a D-flip flop can be used to compare this reference signal to the PWM control signal to detect a power supply overload condition.

What you’ll learn:

• How to implement duty-cycle based detection of overload/overcurrent conditions in power supplies

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Author & Publication:

Gregory Mirsky, Continental Automotive Systems, Deer Park, Ill., How2Power Today, May 16 2017

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