The Top 10 Most Popular Power Management Technical Articles of 2013
Here in time-honored reverse order are the top ten most popular Power Management technical articles of 2013. Here is your chance to enjoy them again.
10. How compact fluorescent lamps work – and how to dim them
Compact fluorescent lamps (CFLs) are replacing incandescent light bulbs at a rapid rate due to their tremendous energy savings and longer lifetime. Additional energy savings can be achieved by dimming, but the electronic ballast required to control the lamp has a higher cost and is difficult to design. This article written by Tom Ribarich of International Rectifier explained how a CFL works, how to dim them, and describes a solution for 3-way dimming applications.
Steve Elliott of XP Power examined the issues surrounding why you should try to avoid using a fan to cool a power supply.
8. Power Factor and Solid State Lighting – Implications, Complications and Resolutions
Lighting comprises approximately 17.5% of global electricity consumption. As the world transitions from incandescent to solid state lighting (SSL) technology, utilities and government regulatory agencies worldwide are concerned that, as this large segment of the consumption base switches to SSL, it will increase infrastructure costs. This is due to the reactive nature of LED-based solid state lighting, which results in higher distribution currents that adversely affect power factor (PF) and, in turn create a larger demand on the power grid explained Hubie Notohamiprodjo of iWatt,
7. Power supply grounding – which camp are you in?
Robert Kollman posed the question which camp are you in when it comes to the power supply grounding debate?
6. An overview of ZigBee’s Smart Energy Profile 2.0 standard
Srinath Balaraman and Anil Khanna of Mentor Graphics provided an overview of the Smart Energy Profile 2.0 (SEP), an emerging standard in the smart energy market, being developed by the ZigBee Alliance.
5. Understanding grounding, shielding, and guarding in high impedance applications
James Niemann of Keithley Instruments explored how ground loops and poor or nonexistent electrostatic shielding can cause error or noise currents to flow in measurement leads or the device under test (DUT), as well as techniques for identifying these error currents and preventing them from undermining measurement integrity.
4. Design a flyback primary switch snubber
This article written by Robert Kollman of Texas Instruments examined how to design a flyback primary switch snubber.
3. Three simple split-rail power supply topologies
In third place we have you come across a need for a split-rail, low-power supply from a single input voltage? For example, this could be +12/-12 volts from 5 volts or +/-5 volts from 12 volts. This Power Tip presented three power-supply topology options to meet these types of requirements with varying degrees of performance and costs.
2. Simple solutions for a single-device PWM waveform generator
Snatching the runner-up slot is Budge Ing of Maxim Integrated who showed two methods for implementing a stand-alone analog PWM waveform generator. The designs can also be modified to make a dual-device PWM generator.
1. Fast-charging supercapacitors using energy harvesters
Claiming the top spot for 2013 is an artcile by Yogesh Ramadass which described ways to speed-up charging of a supercapacitor by more than 20 times when compared to existing systems. The solutions used a solar cell as the energy harvester. The solutions are equally applicable to other energy harvesting sources as well.