Leadless Remote Sensing on Programmable Power Supplies

Introduction
Today, engineers demand dc power supplies with output characteristics that can be programmed for their ever-changing applications. Functional relationships between voltage and current, time dependent profiling, computer interfacing, higher bandwidth performance, safe remote sensing, and a host of programmable features, that were virtually impossible to implement without the programmability of today’s digital devices, are needed to meet today’s demands.
This functionallity is needed for applications like Solar Array Simulation, testing of High speed semoconductors and other applications where you would like to add digital processing.

Advantages of remote sensing
Remote sensing is used to improve the degradation of regulation which will occur at the load when the voltage drop in the connecting wires is appreciable. Normally, this feature is accomplished through the connection of sense leads connected directly to the load rather than to the output terminals of the power supply. Sometimes sensing the load voltage is not practical or possible. Long tethers, requiring heavy cables, are hard to fabricate with sense lead cables. Leadless Remote Sensing, i.e. sensing output current and raising the power supply’s output voltage can be an effective alternative to adding remote sense leads. While this might seem trivial for relatively short lead lengths, this is not the case for applications of distant load points such as ocean tethers to vehicles.

Application:
We do zoom in on one particular application in this case: Leadless Remote sensing on DC power supplies.
In some applications there are extremly long power lines which are so long that the maximum remote sense voltage levels can’t overcome the loss in the power lines.
One nice example is for instance deep see sensors with kilometers of power cable.
But you want to make sure the output voltage of your power supply is exactly what it should be at the connection of the sensors.

Technical note
MagnaPower did write an interesting technical note on leadless remote sensing.

In this example, the power supply’s output voltage is adjusted, in response to output current compensating for the voltage drop caused in the connecting leads to the load.