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Reduce Power Dissipation With Dropping Capacitors: A Smart Use of Capacitive Reactance
November 11, 2024
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Connecting dropping resistors in series with resistive loads often leads to significant energy dissipation. In AC circuits, using dropping capacitors can greatly minimize this energy loss. For low-power supplies, these capacitors can even serve as a viable alternative to transformers.
In electronic design, the problem of voltage drop occurs frequently. A common-sense practice is to avoid high dropout values on resistors or linear regulators, just due to the large amount of energy (and heat) that would be dissipated — and wasted.
Figure 1: Starting from relatively low input voltages, in some cases the use of dropping resistors is still
simple and cost-effective, even from an energy point of view.
A First Practical Example
In AC circuits, the component most commonly employed to induce a large voltage drop is the transformer, but it is bulky, heavy and relatively expensive. To look for a possible solution, let’s start from the practical example shown in Figure 1. It’s a vacu...
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