Shunt regulator output capacitor
- By ainami
- Power Supplies
- 6 Replies
I have a china/ebay 5V linear power supply that I am re-capping. It looks like a shunt regulator circuit. The smaller 100uf/470uf appear to be helper capacitors for the pre-driver circuit. I can see four zener diodes in each power supply (it's a dual power supply board).
The DC voltage is generated by two IRFZ24N N-Channel MOSFETS wired in parallel. The output pins connect to 0.43 ohm resistors (white blocks in picture), which then both connect to +VOUT. Honestly, this almost looks like an amplifier board (which it is in a way).
However, there is a really big 6000uf capacitor as the output capacitor directly on the VOUT leg (as pointed out in the picture below - sorry for the bad quality). When I removed this, the board is marked for a 4700uf. This seems to me like an abnormally large value to use for a regulator output capacitor. I have a 2700uf Nichicon PM on order for this position (I love PM caps in digital power supplies), but now I'm thinking that I should really put a small cap here, such as a 330uf. I have been told that a really large output capacitor on a regulator could slow the regulator down in some situations.
Does anyone have any thoughts on this decision? This will be powering a digital S/PDIF output board.
Ack, it looks like diyaudio is no longer supporting hosting of inserted pictures, and I don't have a website where I can place this, so you'll have to just look at the original ebay pictures:
HIFI-Linear-power-supply-two-Way-LPS-50W-50W-DC-5V
The DC voltage is generated by two IRFZ24N N-Channel MOSFETS wired in parallel. The output pins connect to 0.43 ohm resistors (white blocks in picture), which then both connect to +VOUT. Honestly, this almost looks like an amplifier board (which it is in a way).
However, there is a really big 6000uf capacitor as the output capacitor directly on the VOUT leg (as pointed out in the picture below - sorry for the bad quality). When I removed this, the board is marked for a 4700uf. This seems to me like an abnormally large value to use for a regulator output capacitor. I have a 2700uf Nichicon PM on order for this position (I love PM caps in digital power supplies), but now I'm thinking that I should really put a small cap here, such as a 330uf. I have been told that a really large output capacitor on a regulator could slow the regulator down in some situations.
Does anyone have any thoughts on this decision? This will be powering a digital S/PDIF output board.
Ack, it looks like diyaudio is no longer supporting hosting of inserted pictures, and I don't have a website where I can place this, so you'll have to just look at the original ebay pictures:
HIFI-Linear-power-supply-two-Way-LPS-50W-50W-DC-5V