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Registered Member #152
Joined: Sun Feb 12 2006, 03:36PM
Location: Czech Rep.
Posts: 3384
Hi, I was wondering if there are any "better" - ie. more reliable, stable and noise immune ICs than the standard ones like TL494 or UC3843. We are talking about several kilowatts to tens of kW power supplies - electric car chargers, welders, resistive metal heating etc.
The topology is always the same, so in theory even the TL494 should work, but I get the impression that these are control ICs for low power applications and might not stand up to the noise levels present in large industrial power supplies.
Of course you could use a microcontroller, but I think these are no better when it comes to noise immunity.
Registered Member #162
Joined: Mon Feb 13 2006, 10:25AM
Location: United Kingdom
Posts: 3140
I repair industrial electronics and based on what I've seen, the UC series are used everywhere, the first digit is usually the temperature range, so rather than a UC3843 use a UC2843 etc. Optocouplers are cheap and seem to be reliable for 5 to 10 years but are a significant source of failures in drives (motor inverters) With common industrial designs very few failures are due to logic sections, power devices, power supplies, electrolytic capacitors and optocouplers are first suspects. electro-mechanical devices are of course less reliable than all of the above.
Registered Member #1232
Joined: Wed Jan 16 2008, 10:53PM
Location: Doon tha Toon!
Posts: 881
I'll second what Sulaiman wrote. It is most often the same controller chips that are used in high-power kit as is used in low-power equipment. For instance ST's L4981 is found providing active PFC in dinky little 100W switched-mode power supplies, and also in multi-kW high-end professional systems.
Obviously some chips like flyback controllers don't translate to higher powers due to the inherent unsuitability of that topology for high-power use. But things like continuous-mode PFC chips, and any forward-converter type controller chips can be scalled up to higher powers without problems.
For example, up to 3kW I have used a single L4981 chip with little supporting circuitry to implement active PFC. Then above 3kW I've employed dual L4981 controllers to implement a 2-phase interleaved active boost PFC. The two controllers were clocked from a divided down crystal module to ensure that they are exacly 180 degrees out of phase with each other.
In general the controller chips that are used at higher powers are the same as those at low power, except maybe sometimes there are more of them (for interleaving multiple power stages), with the associated benefits that this technique brings. There are some clever soft-switching techniques using active snubbing and energy recylcing etc that are used at high power, but control signals for the auxilliary swithes in these topologies are often just generated from the main controller output using glue-logic, mono-stable timers etc. You use what "comodity" chips you can to do the bulk of the work, then design the rest of the circuitry around them.
Things like under-voltage lockout, over-voltage shut down, and particularly thermal protection etc, can become much more critical in high-power systems. Therefore it's not uncommon to see the basic features of the controller IC supplemented by circuitry to implement additional safety, protection or housekeeping functions.
You get signal integrity and EMC problems at all power levels in power electronics, so it's not really a controller IC issue. The controller IC will only be as good as the signals that you feed into it, so cleaning up the current-sense signal in a 10kW inverter is just as important as filtering the sense signal in a dinky flyback converter.
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Control ICs for high power SMPS "industrial grade"
