Something is definitly wrong with the calculation

The idea is: a LED (Vf=1.8V,I=20MA) will light as Mains(322V Vp) is ON. In the circuit I replaced the LED with 100 Ohm Load resistor to avoid burning a LED, until I get the calculations right.

Well the calculations does not make any sense to me!!!!!!. Here is the link https://www.circuitlab.com/circuit/hqhd3u/mains-trial3/

by arishy
July 13, 2014

Two things:

i) "I replaced the LED with 100 Ohm Load resistor to avoid burning a LED"

CL isn't some sort of crowd sourced Mechanical Turk Electronics Lab where you draw a circuit online and a vast warehouse full of people diligently build copies of your circuit, test it and then post back the test results.

CL is a simulator. You cannot burn an LED in a simulator. If you want a LED as your load then put a LED in the simulation schematic.

ii) The root of your problem is that you have put a 1 milliohm resistor in parallel with C1.

See:

https://www.circuitlab.com/docs/the-basics/#human_friendy_inputs

:)

by signality
July 13, 2014
  1. Device equivalent resistor. That was my purpose of putting the Led replacement. In design you do that all the time. Also I want it to compare the "Simulator" calculation with Lab measurement and taking the "specific device property" OUT of the equation. I hope you understand that.
  2. The 1 M Ohm resistor is a "protection" resistor when you deal with High voltage.

I hope I do not get the same (...) remark from you about this one too. !!!!!

by arishy
July 13, 2014

@arishy,

1) The point I was trying to make is that you use a simulator is to investigate things before you build them so that when you build them you get pretty much what you have already seen in simulation. The "specific device property" of a LED used as an indicator (as opposed to a string used for illumination) is basically about a 2V to 5V forward voltage drop (depending on the LED type).

Compared to the 322V peak voltage, the LED forward voltage plus the the approximate 1.4V drop of the bridge rectifier is negligible so you might as well put the LED in from the start.

2) I am familiar with the use of high value bleed or 'protection' resistors across capacitors used in high voltage circuits.

However, I am sorry that you feel the need to be sarcastic about my pointing out that you have accidentally set the reistor in parallel with C1 to 1 miliOhm instead of the 1 MegOhm that you intended because you have not realised that in CL, the lower case 'm' prefix represents the 'mlili' scale factor of 1e-3 as opposed to the upper case 'M' representing the 'Mega' scale factor of 1e6.

Noting that at the time of writing this post you have not corrected the value of R3, I would like to suggest that you take a moment to read the link that I posted:

https://www.circuitlab.com/docs/the-basics/#human_friendy_inputs

which explains the use of prefixes in CL.

by signality
July 14, 2014

Thank you for taking the time to explain. One liner can saved us both time BUT I found the discussion as always enlightening to say the least. "milili" ohm ...Hum....CL actually took it that way !!!!

Data validation is a huge and "expensive" topic, so I hope with more subscriptions CL can improve on it. After all we are "still" humans!!!!

by arishy
July 14, 2014

No problem,

:)

by signality
July 14, 2014

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