Calculate the dissipated power over diode?

Thread Starter

uhdam

Joined Jan 24, 2013
23
In my circuit I have using the many diodes, but I need to calculate the losses across the diode. I have idea about the formulas and how to calculate the losses for conduction, switching losses and some other losses as diode losses due to leakage current. But,
I want to know that where we can calculate these losses?
where ever the diode is exits in the circuit we need to calculate these three losses such as conduction, switching, leakage current ?
[OR]
We have any certain conditions to calculate these losses?
I mean, for example:
If we have a diode at the secondary side of the transformer for rectifying stage, we can used to calculate the switching and conduction losses!
But in my case I have used the diodes some other applications as well. So what kind of losses we need to calculate?
 

crutschow

Joined Mar 14, 2008
38,392
Generally, unless you are operating at a very high frequency, you only have to worry about conduction losses.
Since the forward voltage drop of a diode is non-linear (logarithmic) with current, there's no simple way to accurately calculate these losses for a transformer-rectifier-capacitor stage, since the diodes carry very high peak current spikes in such a configuration.
An approximation can be made by looking at the data sheet to estimate the average forward drop and multiply that by the average current through it.

Simulating the circuit with a Spice program, such as the free LTspice program from Linear Technology will give a fairly accurate value for this dissipation.
 
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