ELECTRONICS4–FundamentalsofElectronicsI.docVIP

This lab exercise is ?2002 by Ren Colantoni. You are welcome to use it for any non-profit educational purpose to which it may apply. Just dont try to make money with it. El 04- Electronics 4Laboratory Exercise 17 – Loaded Voltage Divider OBJECTIVE: To design a voltage divider that provides a set of required voltages and currents to three loads. MATERIALS: Protoboard; power supply; digital multimeter; miscellaneous resistors. DISCUSSION: Resistors in series may be called voltage dividers because they divide the voltage applied across the series string’s ends into smaller quantities. This is in accordance with Kirchhoff’s voltage law that describes a major or applied voltage in terms of the sum of the smaller voltages in the same current loop. We can make use of such a circuit to provide a fixed amount of voltage and current to a variety of loads so that they all work from one power supply. To do this requires: The voltages needed by the individual loads all add up equal to or less than the voltage available from the power source; The currents needed by the individual loads all add up to less than the current available from the power source; The current requirements of the individual loads are constant. This approach won’t work where the current demands of the load vary considerably over time. Consider the circuit of Figure 1. In this example, we have a 24 volt power supply available, and we need voltages of 20, 16, and 9 volts for three loads. The loads each have a certain amount of current that they need to function at their rated voltages. We also have a bleeder current of 10mA that make sure that the divider itself is a closed circuit. Essentially, this is a series-parallel circuit and it can be analyzed with Ohm’s Law and the various series and parallel resistance formulas. We use the series resistors to act as a voltage divider to provide the required load voltages. We can compute the value of the resistors in the series string using Ohm’s Law. For instan