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Leadless Remote Sensing on Programmable Power Supplies

Introduction
Modulation allows emulation of power sources such as photovoltaic cells, batteries, and fuel cells. Another very interesting but less known application of control loop emulation is leadless remote sensing.

Advantages of remote sensing
Remote sensing is used to improve the degradation of regulation which will occur at the load when the voltage drop in the connecting wires is appreciable. Normally, this feature is accomplished through the connection of sense leads connected directly to the load rather than to the output terminals of the power supply. Sometimes sensing the load voltage is not practical or possible. Long tethers, requiring heavy cables, are hard to fabricate with sense lead cables. Leadless Remote Sensing, i.e. sensing output current and raising the power supply’s output voltage can be an effective alternative to adding remote sense leads. While this might seem trivial for relatively short lead lengths, this is not the case for applications of distant load points such as ocean tethers to vehicles.

Technical note
You can find a technical note on leadless remote sensing here.

In this example, the power supply’s output voltage is adjusted, in response to output current compensating for the voltage drop caused in the connecting leads to the load.

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