Suppose you have n "equally spaced" rectified sinusodial voltage sources. If you add them up you get a smoother voltage. I remember seeing that Asus used this on some of its motherboards and I'm curious as to if it can be used in high current power supplies? Even three phase seems to be a huge improvement in the capacitive filtering needs.
Is this practical?
Looking at this site
It says that I would need .1F or more just for a 15A with a fixed voltage and its only good up to 1V. For my ps I want to have a variable voltage source which might be from 2V to 20V. So I might be dropping ~20V across the regulator at 10A. This is only 200W and I was going to use several transistors to split the current load.
The very last schematic is for high current regulation and I was going to duplicate the stage with several TIP120's and BJT's. I think I can run those stages in parallel to reduce the power dissipation on the TIP120's? I might have to mess around with the resistor values but I'll try and figure that out later.
The real issue is the supply filtering that I'm worried about. I have a few 3300uF caps but even then it would take about a dozen or more by what that web site says and even then I wouldn't get very good regulation.
I was wondering if there are alternative methods to filtering besides using caps that are not more expensive for high currents.
What I remember from the ASUS motherboard was that it had a series of small caps around the cpu socket and it was something like 8 phase for smoothing over the voltage to the cpu. I can't seem to find any information on the subject though.
Thanks, Bob