I am designing a crossover for a midtop speaker with a 12 inch woofer that can handle 250 watts rms. When I check the power dissipation graph in xsim one of the inductors shows that it will dissipate up to 8 watts. Is this relevant at all? I'm pretty sure this is something to look out for with resistors but I'm not sure if this is important for inductors but it surprised me how much more power that inductor dissipated than the other components.
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Without seeing the crossover I wouldn't want to guess, but I'd have a look at the series resistance of the inductor. Heat can cause issues in some cases.
8 watts in an inductor could make it quite warm if it's a tiny one, or if they don't get any ventilation.
Larger inductors dissipate heat better, and with heavier gauge wire produce less heat to begin with.
Larger inductors dissipate heat better, and with heavier gauge wire produce less heat to begin with.
Compared to the powerloss of some 200+ watts in the voicecoil a Xo inductor loss of 8W is not to bad
I assume that this is the series pass inductor for the woofer? Looks like your inductor DCR is around 0.25 ohms. Just make sure to include the DCR of the inductor and cables you will be using in your box-modeling sims. As far as 8W of heat dissipation in what is, probably, a fairly large inductor, I would not lose any sleep over it.
Dan
Dan
How confident are you of the DCR tolerance, and also of the temperature rise it may experience. Copper wire tempco may increase the actual temp rise more than you think.