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Friday, March 28, 2014

What is a floating power supply output?

First let me tell you that a floating power supply output is NOT what is shown below in Figure 1 (haha).

Some Agilent power supplies

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What is a floating power supply output?

Now some background: earth ground is the voltage potential of the earth and to greatly reduce the risk
of subjecting a person to an electrical shock, the outer covering (chassis) of most electrical devices is
internally connected to a wire that is connected to earth ground usually through the power cord. The
idea here is to ensure that all surfaces a person can touch are at the same voltage potential; namely,
the one that he is standing on: earth ground. As long as that is true, the person can freely touch
things without the risk of getting shocked due to two of the things he touches at the same time being
at different voltage potentials, or one of the things being at a high voltage potential with respect to the
earth. If the voltage difference is high enough, the person could be shocked. Earth grounding the
chassis also protects the user if there is an internal problem with an electrical device causing its
chassis to inadvertently come in contact with an internal high voltage wire. Since the chassis is earth
grounded, an internal short to the chassis is really a short to ground and will blow a fuse or trip a
circuit breaker to protect the user instead of putting the chassis at the high voltage. If you touched a
chassis that had a high voltage with respect to ground on it, your body completes the path to ground
and you get shocked!

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So to protect the user (and for some other reasons), the chassis of Agilent power supplies are
grounded internally through the ground wire (the third wire) in the AC input line cord. Additionally, most
if not all of our Agilent power supplies have isolated (floating) outputs. That means that neither the
positive output terminal nor the negative output terminal is connected to earth (chassis) ground. See
Figure 2.

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Figure 3 shows an example of non-floating outputs with the negative output terminal grounded.

For floating DC power supplies, the voltage potential appears from the positive output terminal to the
negative output terminal. There is no voltage potential (at least, none with any power behind it) from
either the positive terminal to earth ground or from the negative output terminal to earth ground. A
power supply with a floating output is more flexible since, if desired, either the positive or negative
terminal (or neither) can be connected to earth ground. Some devices under test (DUT) have a DC
input with either the positive or negative input terminal connected to earth ground. If one of the power
supply outputs was also internally connected to earth ground, when connected to the DUT, it could
short out the power supply output. So power supplies with floating output terminals (no connections to
earth ground) are more versatile.
If the outputs are floating from earth ground, we need to specify how far above or below earth ground
you can float the output terminals. Our power supply documentation provides this information. For
example, most Agilent power supply output terminals can float to +/-240 Vdc off of ground. You will
frequently see the following in our documentation:

Also, some power supplies have different float ratings for the positive and negative output terminals.
For example, for Agilent N5700 models rated for more than 60 Vdc, the following note in the manual
means you can float the positive output terminal up to +/-600 Vdc from ground or the negative output
terminal up to +/-400 Vdc from ground:

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The output characteristic table may list this as Output Terminal Isolation as shown below which
means the same thing as maximum float voltage:

Figure 4 shows an example of floating a power supply to 200 V above ground. The power supply
output is set to 40 V.

You can see from the last example that you have to take the power supply output voltage into
consideration when ensuring you are not violating the float voltage rating. If you exceed the float
voltage rating of the power supply, you are potentially exceeding the voltage rating of internal parts that
could cause the internal parts to fail or break down and present a shock hazard, so dont violate the
float voltage rating!
Posted by GaryR at 11:05 PM

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Labels: earth ground, float voltage, isolation voltage, power supply, Usage

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