12v 250w Car SMPS based off SG3525

Redwire

New member
Although the SG3525 can direct drive MOSFETs, I find you can drive one pair of small MOSFETs (15V and <2,000pF) but the very low RDS on MOSFETS have too much gate capacitance (>10,000pF). Since there is only one GND pin, switching noise gets into the chip and it gets unstable.

Another limitation is the IC's output transistors are good to 0.4A pk max. and it gets too hot. See pg. 23 Eq. 67 calculation (100kHz, 6 MOSFETS, PD=1.3W ) AN2794: 1 kW dual stage DC-AC converter based on the STP160N75F3 (pdf)

For the deadtime resistor (from pin 5 to pin 7), I leave it in and tweak later. On the bench it can look like you don't need it- but for a car app SMPS, you can hit it 40°C-50°C on a hot day- with the slower switching times, then you need some deadtime.

It's two design philosophies - keep it really simple or put in a bit extra for a stronger design.
 

codex653

New member
yah i'm gonna be including a dead time resistor in there anyways...don't want anything blowing up on me accidentally. :D Anyways, it's unfortunately gonna be a while before I can get on with this project and do some more testing and start some actual building. :( I have baseball tournaments out the wazzoo for the next month or so until graduation (YES!!!) and preparation for 3 AP tests. So it looks like I won't be having any real time until summer, but i'm still gonna do my best to fit in some work whenever I can :)
 

codex653

New member
Hey well I was able to get some work done on the SMPS this weekend! shocker i know :eek:
Anyways, I breadboarded the second half of the input switching stage so now I have everything in place except for the output components.

Same modifications to the SG3525 stage in Fig 1 I said earlier still apply. On Q1-Q4, R7-R10 are 10 ohm resistors and the Gate drive resistors are 27 ohms. I am only driving one pair of mosfets right now. The transformer is 5+5 turns on the primary, all wound in the same direction.

The problem is this: with the setup described, I found that the mosfet's gate drive squarewave only reached 5v peak. Without the mosfets connected, it (outputs from Q1-Q4) was switching between V+ and Gnd. Also, the mosfets started to heat a little bit, but I imagine that has something to do with only having 5V on the Gate. Anybody have suggestions?
 

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codex653

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So close to being done!!

Ok so I got some more progress today on the breadboard! I got the mosfets to do their switching 'thang' which is a relief in and of itself -) Anyways, I now come to you with a different problem I encountered. When power is switched on, the waveform looks like the image posted below. I know that that is the spike from the turn off of the other mosfet, and it appears to be around 40v. The mosfets heat up pretty fast and when I checked the load current on the 15v power supply, it was drawing 1.28A. That should NOT be happening especially when there is no load on the secondary.

My suspicions for what is causing the problem lie in the driver circuit, but I'm not sure. I was thinking it could be the dead time (maybe needs to be higher?), maybe need to put a snubber on the windings, or possibly my mosfets just aren't switching fast enough?

I would really appreciate some help here. I'm kinda at a loss for what to do, but I'll start some research on the all knowing search engine called Google haha :w)
 

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codex653

New member
I'm looking at getting some dedicated Gate drivers for my mosfets. these two from TI seem to fit the bill for what I want to do:) If i don't use them now then I can use them on some later project
UCC27424D
UCC37322D
 

Redwire

New member
I would try to narrow it down a bit.

First get the gate-drive fixed up - it should be more than 10V swing. You loose about 2V in the 3525 and another 1V in the buffer. Is it 5V still? Coming out of the SG3525? Or after the transistor buffer?

Check the mosfet's gate - measure ohms from gate to source, it should be really high unless the mosfets are damaged from ESD. Some mosfets will only partially turn on at 5V and thus run hot. They will need a small heatsink anyway.

The no-load current drain is too high at 1.28A, so it could be many things:
A mosfet is half-toasted and staying partially on, or the gate-drive is not shutting them off (Pull the mosfets and put a 1k resistor as a dummy load on the buffer and see how it does)

If the gate-drive looks good, and current is still high, I would then look at the transformer being wonky - saturating (since you are at full PWM)- try lowering Vcc from 15V to say 10V, or increasing frequency/lowering duty cycle. Or maybe it's wound funny, or air gap from core halves not being tight. 4-5turns sounds fine.
 

codex653

New member
I would try to narrow it down a bit.

First get the gate-drive fixed up - it should be more than 10V swing. You loose about 2V in the 3525 and another 1V in the buffer. Is it 5V still? Coming out of the SG3525? Or after the transistor buffer?

Check the mosfet's gate - measure ohms from gate to source, it should be really high unless the mosfets are damaged from ESD. Some mosfets will only partially turn on at 5V and thus run hot. They will need a small heatsink anyway.

The no-load current drain is too high at 1.28A, so it could be many things:
A mosfet is half-toasted and staying partially on, or the gate-drive is not shutting them off (Pull the mosfets and put a 1k resistor as a dummy load on the buffer and see how it does)

If the gate-drive looks good, and current is still high, I would then look at the transformer being wonky - saturating (since you are at full PWM)- try lowering Vcc from 15V to say 10V, or increasing frequency/lowering duty cycle. Or maybe it's wound funny, or air gap from core halves not being tight. 4-5turns sounds fine.

I will definitely get on that once I have the chance. Its too bad you didn't respond a couple of hours ago, then I would have had time to go and check all this stuff out :) I will try and look at this this weekend, but I'm stacked with a baseball tournament. We'll see where I get to. Updates to come later!
 

codex653

New member
I would try to narrow it down a bit.

First get the gate-drive fixed up - it should be more than 10V swing. You loose about 2V in the 3525 and another 1V in the buffer. Is it 5V still? Coming out of the SG3525? Or after the transistor buffer?

Check the mosfet's gate - measure ohms from gate to source, it should be really high unless the mosfets are damaged from ESD. Some mosfets will only partially turn on at 5V and thus run hot. They will need a small heatsink anyway.

The no-load current drain is too high at 1.28A, so it could be many things:
A mosfet is half-toasted and staying partially on, or the gate-drive is not shutting them off (Pull the mosfets and put a 1k resistor as a dummy load on the buffer and see how it does)

If the gate-drive looks good, and current is still high, I would then look at the transformer being wonky - saturating (since you are at full PWM)- try lowering Vcc from 15V to say 10V, or increasing frequency/lowering duty cycle. Or maybe it's wound funny, or air gap from core halves not being tight. 4-5turns sounds fine.

OK I posted a pic of the gate drive with the dummy load. The probe is from the buffer and not the 3525, however both waveforms are similar and are well above ten volts.

I checked the mosfets next and they seemed to be in perfect order. I got infinite resistance on my multi meter when measured from gate to source.

So since those two checked out, I decided to rewind the transformer this time paying more attention to how I wound....I will hook it up here in a minute and see how it goes
 

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codex653

New member
AHAH!!!!! Success!!! Looks like rewinding the transformer really did the trick! Below is the picture of the drain waveform when connected to the transformer, no load. None of the driver circuitry is getting warm at all and after ten minutes of running it, the mosfets have only slightly heated up! Also there is no snubber in place at this moment.

The only thing that I have noticed is that with no load, the current the ENTIRE circuitry draws is 0.49A vs 0.22A when everything but the transformer is connected. Does this seem to be normal with smps transformers or should I rewind it/play around with the frequency to get the minimum no load current draw I can?
 

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Redwire

New member
Hurrah!
I think your no-load current is fine, you lose a few watts in the transformer core. If your SMPS is 90% efficient, at 250W out there's 25W of losses.
You can lower flux in the core (more pri turns) but then you need more turns and lose more in the copper windings, so it's a tradeoff.
 

codex653

New member
Yeah I'm really happy it all worked! I've finally gotten around to making the prototype of the driver board and the picture is posted below. It works a bit better than the breadboarded version in that the output waveform is a bit cleaner now. The final board is going to be a bit smaller and look a bit neater too.

Today I'm going to rewind the transformer one last time and try and get it as perfect as I can get it. I didn't realize that the half an amp or so that I was losing was actually the transformer losses. Somewhere in the back of my mind I seemed to have thought that it would only be a couple milliamps.

I also threw on a secondary real quick just to see voltage to turn ratio for the transformer and it seems that with 5+5 turns on the primary and 3+3 turns on the secondary, I got 9v exactly after rectification and filtering with a 12v primary voltage. So it looks like for the secondary, 1 turn equals roughly 3v. Pretty easy!

Then I guess after I build and test this, I get to build up my output rectification and filter board. Does anybody happen to have equations to figure out the ripple current on the output caps? I would love to figure out how to optimize my output section.
 

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RocketFuel

New member
Hello people, my name is Fernando, I am from Argentina and I am a new member. I have been reading this thread today and let me tell you I built this power supply as my first power supply. I found it originally posted on Rod Elliott's page. In my experience it worked at once using "F1" schematic. I could never finish the project since I wanted a regulated power supply and outputs were too variable (+/-35 volts Engine off ; +/-45 volts engine on for example) and when connected to a single LM3886 you could use a voltmeter as a Vumeter... So, I decided to start reading books. Now I am more experienced and I can tell you there are lot of things missing in this design.

First thing is you cant drive power mosfets using SG3525. Reason: in a DC application a current flow in only the nanoampere range is needed to maintain the on or off state. but switching the MOSFET quickly between the on and off states may require an ampere or more of peak current. This means that the driver should be a low-impedance active pull-up/pull-down type driver, such as a totem-pole driver. The totem-pole driver should also have a solid, well-bypassed voltage source as its supply in order to source and sink the relatively high peak currents. [Marty Brown - Practical switching power supply design book]

Second thing is not to forget how many current we are talking about. If you are planning to build a 300W power supply, you are talking about 25 Amps + losses. PCB must be designed to support that currents and be sure to add enough capacitors because you will need a low impedance source. In my case I have 4 x 4700 uF capacitors at input.

Third thing is be aware of using Push Pull. Its an old tricky topology (flux imbalance problem), still a valuable one but maybe a full bridge would be more suitable because it would need less core room since core windings will be big for current.

Fourth thing is allways introduce a small dead time because there are capacitors everywhere...

Im redesigning my old project to a full bridge topology and I will post results as soon as project is working. Im not designing it in a single PCB, Im doing every block in a separate PCB just in case I have to modify. I will be watching this post just in case someone reply.

Take care!
 

codex653

New member
that's good to hear that you have built this project successfully! After researching a lot online and in books, I have come to the same conclusion as you in that there are sections that are lacking in this circuit. However this is the largest switching supply I have built to date, so I will start off with this and build on it from there. I have certainly seriously considered the full bridge as the next step up after I get the experience building the Rod Elliot one first. Thanks for your post!

For the rest of you that have been following me, I'll be graduating from highschool here in the next two weeks! :) So then comes summer time, and with summer comes a job! With a job comes $$$ and with money comes NEW PARTS!!!!! :D Woo HOO! I'm so close to being able to really get back on this project again! Updates to come soon!
 

codex653

New member
well...got some good news and I got some bad news. Good news first!

I got my transformer all nice and wound well with 5+5 on the primary and 13+13 on the secondary to give me ~31v with the rectifier and cap filter in place. The output waveform is a nice squarewave with some over-shoot, but that's because I have no snubbers in place yet.

Now for the bad news...When I went to go try and test it's ability for high current, it utterly failed me. I was only able to draw around 2.2A max, even with a dead short on the secondary. Then, the frequency also dropped dramatically, which i could hear thanks to the vibrating cores haha. I then used a 120 ohm 5 watt resistor on the output (with the rectifier and caps in place) and the voltage ended up dropping to 24vdc with only a 1/3 of an amp!!! It's quite ridiculous numbers for a "300 watt" power supply :p I believe I've narrowed it down to one thing....the core is saturating? That's the only thing I can think of. My power supply is ok as it can supply 6A @12v, and I know my drivers/mosfets work ok. Any suggestions on how to fix this?

Oh and I've uploaded some more pictures for you guys! this time they are taken with an actual camera so they look nice haha :)
 

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RocketFuel

New member
Reflections...

Dear codex653: I dont want to be hard on you but what you have just posted is terrorific...

How do you pretend to make it work in a protoboard? With small wires attached to power mosfets and a transformer with cocodriles? No way!

Besides I can see a damaged resistor on control pcb!

Now listen to me, stop using that protoboard and MAKE DECENT PCB! and when say decent means with HUGE TRACKS and please put tin in primary circuit tracks!

Have you ever thought how much is 25 Amps? I guess not but trust me its a very large current, especially for a PCB!

Have you ever thought how important is wire gauge? If you see the formula is

P = i^2 * R

That means the more current flows through it, the more power you loose in that wire with the consecuent voltage drop on it.

The same applies to transformer wiring, with some extra rules but the photo shows a thin wiring.

Please dont shortcircuit outputs!!

Connection between 12V test power supply and your power supply must be made with huge wires soldered to pcb to avoid resistance.

Another thing is, when voltages start to drop the power supply must raise pwm to compensate and that is feedback related, totally beyond the scope of this thread.

Now, my intention is to make you think... not to make you feel bad. In my opinion you are hurried to post or to make it work but thats not the way.

My power supply worked, it wasnt the eight wonder but it worked.

Take care!
 

codex653

New member
Dear codex653: I dont want to be hard on you but what you have just posted is terrorific...

How do you pretend to make it work in a protoboard? With small wires attached to power mosfets and a transformer with cocodriles? No way!

Besides I can see a damaged resistor on control pcb!

Now listen to me, stop using that protoboard and MAKE DECENT PCB! and when say decent means with HUGE TRACKS and please put tin in primary circuit tracks!

Have you ever thought how much is 25 Amps? I guess not but trust me its a very large current, especially for a PCB!

Have you ever thought how important is wire gauge? If you see the formula is

P = i^2 * R

That means the more current flows through it, the more power you loose in that wire with the consecuent voltage drop on it.

The same applies to transformer wiring, with some extra rules but the photo shows a thin wiring.

Please dont shortcircuit outputs!!

Connection between 12V test power supply and your power supply must be made with huge wires soldered to pcb to avoid resistance.

Another thing is, when voltages start to drop the power supply must raise pwm to compensate and that is feedback related, totally beyond the scope of this thread.

Now, my intention is to make you think... not to make you feel bad. In my opinion you are hurried to post or to make it work but thats not the way.

My power supply worked, it wasnt the eight wonder but it worked.

Take care!

Thanks for the thoughtful reply RocketFuel....I was actually working on the pcb as I read your post. I know about big tracks and stuff with the current handling etc...the "small" wires you see on that breadboard (except for the gate drive wires) are from mains rated cable that can take atleast 15A, plus they are ridiculously short, maybe at most an inch or so in length. Short and chunky. That's not very much resistance at all for 2.2A. Of course as I'm planning out this pcb, I'm making huge wide tracks and am going to be soldering some wire on top of the high current traces to help beef them up.

The wiring you saw on the transformer was the (comparatively) low current secondary. The most that thing is going to see is 6A peak, not 25-35A...sorry for not clarifying in the pictures what it was. I have a much much thicker winding for the primary under that. The windings you see only have 5 strands for initial prototyping, which can easily handle 4A atleast (i current tested the wires)...the high current primary has 18. The resistor you see isn't damaged either...it's just aesthetic damage that occurred when I was trying to wiggle it out of the breadboard one day. The ohm meter still shows that it works just as well as the "undamaged" ones. As for the crocodiles, those go to my mini digital scope dude...they have nothing to do with the operation of the circuit.

In addition, I've built a 10A variable pwm supply for a motor on that breadboard. Just for fun, I decided to take the frequency up to 100Khz and see what the waveform was like. Then I added power resistors as a load and took it up to the full 10A, on that breadboard, just for fun. Did I mention this was on half a foot long wires too??

I'm just trying to figure out why the circuit current limited itself at the small value of 2.2A...i've proven to myself that much larger currents at higher frequencies with longer wires DO work on my breadboard. The 2.2A is way too small that wire gauge is limiting it etc. Nothing is heating up (well except for the SLIGHTLY warm mosfets) that would indicate current limitation through too small wires, and voltage drops were virtually non-existent at the 2.2A it limited itself at. I was NEVER planning on testing this thing to it's full capacity on my breadboard, ha that would be suicide :x: but i seriously never thought that the thing couldn't handle barely more than 2A without freaking out, especially when there have been worse conditions tested before.

I'm still going to try and figure stuff out, but I thought I might as well post to see if people have ideas. The more heads the better right?
 

RocketFuel

New member
Some tips

Doing some numers you have: 5 primary turns & 13 secondary turns -> Turn ratio is: 13/5 = 2.6

if you apply 12V you must have 12 * 2.6 = 31.2V at secondary minus secondary diode losses. That is correct.

Now, the fact is that if you loose only 2V for example between your power supply output terminal and the mosfets (that would be the whole primary circuit) the secondary output would be: 10 * 2.6 = 26V and since the power supply doesnt realize whats happening your secondary output will fall so you must avoid primary losses at all cost. See the protoboard as "resistive contacts" because when you place a component its contacts are not good.

Ok, now its time to post measurings to analyse the problem. First, place and keep placed a [1K to 10K] resistor on secondary and measure output and primary input voltage where SG3525 is. You must allways have a dummy load connected, not really necessary but it keeps secondary voltages in order. Voltages with no load above 10V can be expected. This is SMPS with "no load".

Then add the 120 Ohms resistor and measure secondary output, primary input voltage where SG3525 is. This is SMPS with load.
I choosed SG3525 Vcc arbitrary, you could use the pin itself of power mosfet (maybe better).

At this point you know the losses at primary, if you see you lost few volts you can expect normally ~24V due to unregulation.

If you want to test your primary circuit, a good idea is to use 2 light bulbs used in front lights of a car and connected to use both filaments, those bulbs are 55W rated and you need two because the push-pull configuration. Then you can go adding 2 more to see how they go warming and measure your power supply searching for resistances. Of course you have to disconnect the transformer to do this.

At this point you can be sure if your primary circuit is able to deliver those "X" watts you want.

I usually test things like UPSs using filament bulbs (because you can still find them here and they are very cheap).

Now looking at transformer, to answer your question, it is not saturating. Reason: If core enters saturation, primary inductance dissapears and the result is an effective shortcircuit at primary with mosfets blowing for sure!

If core is not delivering power it should be due to bad flux selection. You choosed 5 turns for primary... why? Because you started like me, trial and error. Five turns determine certain working point in the core. The idea is to determine the necessary amount of flux to deliver the power, you have to deal with some ecuations and transformer datasheet for that and i cant help you with that now...

Transformer is the heart of the power supply, it must be choosed by making a lot of compromises: Flux, area, frecuency, room for windings, isolation, etc... The goal is to get 50% of it looses in it and the other 50% in windings. That would be a perfect selection.



In real life, according to my experience, people who install real car audio power stages at home without the necesary knowledge place them at the trunk with small wire gauge usually 4mm, the same they use at homes. And when they raise volume they experience different problems because of that... then you measure wire losses between batery and power stage and you find that the power stage is trying to work with 8V or less... teaching: Wire gauges are important and they should allways be kept in mind.

Take care and have a good weekend!
 
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codex653

New member
Doing some numers you have: 5 primary turns & 13 secondary turns -> Turn ratio is: 13/5 = 2.6

if you apply 12V you must have 12 * 2.6 = 31.2V at secondary minus secondary diode losses. That is correct.

Now, the fact is that if you loose only 2V for example between your power supply output terminal and the mosfets (that would be the whole primary circuit) the secondary output would be: 10 * 2.6 = 26V and since the power supply doesnt realize whats happening your secondary output will fall so you must avoid primary losses at all cost. See the protoboard as "resistive contacts" because when you place a component its contacts are not good.

Ok, now its time to post measurings to analyse the problem. First, place and keep placed a [1K to 10K] resistor on secondary and measure output and primary input voltage where SG3525 is. You must allways have a dummy load connected, not really necessary but it keeps secondary voltages in order. Voltages with no load above 10V can be expected. This is SMPS with "no load".

Then add the 120 Ohms resistor and measure secondary output, primary input voltage where SG3525 is. This is SMPS with load.
I choosed SG3525 Vcc arbitrary, you could use the pin itself of power mosfet (maybe better).

At this point you know the losses at primary, if you see you lost few volts you can expect normally ~24V due to unregulation.

If you want to test your primary circuit, a good idea is to use 2 light bulbs used in front lights of a car and connected to use both filaments, those bulbs are 55W rated and you need two because the push-pull configuration. Then you can go adding 2 more to see how they go warming and measure your power supply searching for resistances. Of course you have to disconnect the transformer to do this.

At this point you can be sure if your primary circuit is able to deliver those "X" watts you want.

I usually test things like UPSs using filament bulbs (because you can still find them here and they are very cheap).

Now looking at transformer, to answer your question, it is not saturating. Reason: If core enters saturation, primary inductance dissapears and the result is an effective shortcircuit at primary with mosfets blowing for sure!

If core is not delivering power it should be due to bad flux selection. You choosed 5 turns for primary... why? Because you started like me, trial and error. Five turns determine certain working point in the core. The idea is to determine the necessary amount of flux to deliver the power, you have to deal with some ecuations and transformer datasheet for that and i cant help you with that now...

Transformer is the heart of the power supply, it must be choosed by making a lot of compromises: Flux, area, frecuency, room for windings, isolation, etc... The goal is to get 50% of it looses in it and the other 50% in windings. That would be a perfect selection.



In real life, according to my experience, people who install real car audio power stages at home without the necesary knowledge place them at the trunk with small wire gauge usually 4mm, the same they use at homes. And when they raise volume they experience different problems because of that... then you measure wire losses between batery and power stage and you find that the power stage is trying to work with 8V or less... teaching: Wire gauges are important and they should allways be kept in mind.

Take care and have a good weekend!

ahh thanks again for the post....what you are saying makes sense. It looks like there is more involved with the transformer than what I originally thought..hmm...time to go and do the math! that is, once I find the datasheet for the cores. I think I may end up buying some standard ETD39 cores for this thing as trying to locate transformer data from a computer smps has proven to be very difficult. Ah well, I figured this would happen eventually. It was more economical to try it with the PC power supply core first haha. Gonna get this pcb finished first however. I'll post something up later for who ever is reading this thread to review and make suggestions.
 
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codex653

New member
Ok here is my initial design of the pcb...I don't expect it to be perfect, far from it. I know it's critical to get nice big power traces for the high frequency current, and all the ones you see on there are going to be reinforced with soldered on wire.

The first little board you see is going to be inserted vertically into the pcb to help save space...it's the driver board.

How do you all think I can improve the board?


First Board: driver stage
Second Board: Bottom of the pcb
Third Board: Top of pcb and also acts as ground plane
 

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RocketFuel

New member
Pcb

Hey, thats better. I only see one bad thing: Where you connect your power input positive terminal. You will have to use a big diameter wire gauge that wont fit in that track. My solution for that is to make room for three or four wires of less diameter that you will solder together in the other end.

I lost my SMPS PCB but here is another one im currently building. You can see in it what im talking about.

[img=http://s17.postimage.org/9qab5z39n/Dibujo.jpg]

Remember it need huge wirings and long ones if you intend to place it in a car. And since the battery is not very low impedance source, capacitors are needed to deliver power peaks (in professional car audio, a bigger than 1 Farad capacitor is used... )

Take care!
 
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