Why isolated converter

National Parks. Toggle navigation. External Ac-Dc. Wall Plug. Custom Adapters. Internal Ac-Dc. Board Mount. Chassis Mount. DIN Rail. Dc-Dc Converters. IGBT Driver. CAD Model Library. Parametric Search. Power Blog. Power FAQ. Quality Center. Resource Library. About Us. Contact Us. Distributor Stock. Find a Representative. Isolation Basics Galvanic isolation usually simplified to just isolation is the physical and electrical separation between one section of a circuit and another. Email Address.

Privacy Policy. Insulation, Isolation, and Working Voltage. Ron Stull Power Systems Engineer Ron Stull has gathered a range of knowledge and experience in the areas of analog and digital power as well as ac-dc and dc-dc power conversion since joining CUI in Learn More Privacy Policy. If you have high currents or frequencies riding around one part of a circuit that you'd like to protect another part of the circuit from, isolation is certainly an option. For example, if you have a microcontroller driving a high-current motor with PWM, you can optoisolate the PWM pin on the microcontroller, then power up the motor circuit with an isolated DC to DC.

Doesn't work if you don't optoisolate or isolate in some other way , obviously. If you're building a medical device with patient leads, isolation of the patient leads might be critical to meeting safety standards.

An isolated DC to DC, along with isolation of all the analog and digital signals that need to connect to the patient would be in order.

Also, if you're putting test points into your board, be sure to include one for every ground, and don't forget that its not hard to connect isolated grounds with your oscilloscope ground clips accidentally!

The most common use of an isolated DC to DC converter is in virtually every wall-wart. It's a safety thing. I've also used isolated converters in parallel - both share the same input voltage but the outputs are wired in series to create a split supply. You can also use one just to create a negative supply - it doesn't matter how you connect positive or negative coming out of the circuit so, connecting positive output to local 0V means you get a negative rail when you didn't have one before.

I've also used them to reduce a 30V rail to Sign up to join this community. The best answers are voted up and rise to the top. Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group. Create a free Team What is Teams? Learn more. Ask Question. Asked 7 years, 8 months ago. A transformer is an electrical device consisting of at least two inductor coils wound on a ferromagnetic core.

A transformer is of course typically associated with AC applications, not DC applications. However, applying a transformer in a DC device by just adding a couple extra conversions offers several benefits, including isolating the ground of the input and output, a term known as galvanic isolation.

Also, by relying on transformer windings, such a device can draw on one of the great benefits Tesla used to outduel Edison so many years ago — the flexibility a transformer offers in significantly changing the voltage levels. Figure 2: Galvanic isolation is used where two or more electric circuits must communicate, but their grounds may be at different potentials. The flexibility offered by the isolated DC:DC converter provide some very relevant benefits to a number of the major challenges found in the alternative energy field today.

The isolation of grounds these devices offer is critical when marrying grounded PV systems with floating loads such as batteries or transformerless inverters or both, as can be the case in DC coupled solar plus storage projects. There is great value in grounding PV panels as this can avoid conditions such as potential induced degradation PID that have proven to significantly reduce PV yield over the life of a solar project.

On the load side, large scale battery energy storage systems need to float to ensure their built-in safety systems work as designed. By allowing batteries to float, it takes two leakages to ground to cause a ground fault. Thus, detecting the first leakage to ground is a key to maintaining the safety of energy storage systems. This can be helpful when charging batteries from solar panels that have very large differences in DC voltage.

This can also be required when attaching higher voltage inverters to lower voltage solar panels in cases when older, failed inverters need to be replaced as part of a PV plant repowering exercise.

Additionally, as storage systems grow ever larger, the ability to install many DC-DC converters in parallel safely is needed to develop ever larger battery energy storage.