Hi all,
First time posting on here. I have a cursory electronics background, but there's some more in-depth aspects to this that I could use some help with. To put this short, I'm looking to power a piezoelectric bender (https://www.thorlabs.com/thorproduct.cfm?partnumber=PB4NB2W), for very short amounts of time. It needs a fairly high voltage, and my initial idea was to use a DC power supply and a voltage regulator (hooked up to software on the computer taking care of the activation details) to control when power was sent to the bender. But, I received advice that a voltage regulator would be a poor choice, because it's not a great idea to send square pulses (so off/on signals), but instead I should be aiming for smoothly varying voltages. The same person advised me to use a power transistor instead, operating it in its continuous range to provide smooth varying power.
Apologies if that was long, but wanted to provide the background details, before my main question: what does it mean to operate a transistor in its continuous range? That terminology doesn't seem to pop up in regard to transistors. so I could use a little help/clarification.
First time posting on here. I have a cursory electronics background, but there's some more in-depth aspects to this that I could use some help with. To put this short, I'm looking to power a piezoelectric bender (https://www.thorlabs.com/thorproduct.cfm?partnumber=PB4NB2W), for very short amounts of time. It needs a fairly high voltage, and my initial idea was to use a DC power supply and a voltage regulator (hooked up to software on the computer taking care of the activation details) to control when power was sent to the bender. But, I received advice that a voltage regulator would be a poor choice, because it's not a great idea to send square pulses (so off/on signals), but instead I should be aiming for smoothly varying voltages. The same person advised me to use a power transistor instead, operating it in its continuous range to provide smooth varying power.
Apologies if that was long, but wanted to provide the background details, before my main question: what does it mean to operate a transistor in its continuous range? That terminology doesn't seem to pop up in regard to transistors. so I could use a little help/clarification.
