1 Jul
1999
1 Jul
'99
10:31 a.m.
A well designed PSU will go into "thermal" shutdown, where the heat
produced by the pass transistors is detected and the PSU shuts down until
they cool off. A poorly designed PSU will go into "smoke" shutdown, where
the transistors release their blue smoke and then never work again. The
worst thing about the latter case is that when the transistors go into
thermal avalanche mode they cease operating according to specification and
the output of the supply could literally become nearly anything up to and
including the unregulated DC input from the rectifier (probably 23 volts in
this case)
--Chuck
At 02:03 PM 7/1/99 -0700, you wrote:
Just out of curiosity, what
could conceivably happen if I ran it at 12 amps and it couldn't handle the
load? By the way, it is indeed an inexpensive, linear type...