As i explained in a previous post, I am building an amp that is going to be capable of doing more than 100w. No biggy for most people but when everything you have built previously has been qrp there becomes a whole new set of challenges. With qrp you can just she will be right mate and do what ever you like “Almost” and it will work to some degree. So with this in mind, i set forth on working out what voltage rating i would need for the capacitors in the low pass filter.
What i really wanted to know, was the WHY behind the decisions others had made in their design choices and I started to ask others WHY as well. Often the reply was just use Mica Caps. Did not matter what power level, the answer some gave was just use 500v Mica and you will be right. No explanation, just this is what I do.
So that just never sat well with me, the answer cannot always be use $60 worth of 500v caps in your low pass filter. It took a while but i finally came across some information that seems credible and more importantly reliable and my gut feeling was right, Mica while good, might often be over kill, but still there are some caveats that are important to understand.
Firstly the voltage that a capacitor in a LPF sees is the peak to peak voltage of the AC wave form. Might be obvious to some, but its not information that is easy to find on the internet. So knowing that we can then use the power formula to find out what voltage might be present in the filter. Power(watts) = Voltage^2 / Load(Ohms) where in this case, the voltage of the signal is RMS Volts and once you have solved for it, you need to convert RMS to Peak to Peak by multiplying by 1.4.
So in my case 100w = 70.7vrms/50ohms :: 70.7*1.4 = 100v peak to peak. Now obviously there can always be an impedance mismatch between the low pass filter and the antenna and with that a change in the signal voltage. In my case i also looked at 100w at 25ohms and 100ohms load to get a better picture of what might be expected of the capacitors in the low pass filter. Being that I am actually designing the amp deck to be capable of 400w even though i am only running it at 100w, it means the capacitors need to be able to withstand a peak voltage of about 350V.
So onto the next point, I wont be using Mica Caps, for the very simple reason that $50 worth of caps is a lot of money to throw at something that might be a dismal failure. I will be using SMD ceramics and here is something i learned just recently, ceramic caps derate in capacitance the closer you get to the maximum voltage rating. According to a TI white paper i was reading, you should probbaly derate ceramics in filters by at least 1/3. So I need at least 360V rating, that means using 1Kv or 2Kv ceramic caps should be perfectly fine. The good thing is, Kv rated SMD caps are cheap, in the sub 50 cent range in 1 of qualities on mouser and they are NP0 and 5% tollerance. So i have solved this problem now and can move onto other things like output transformer and core sizes i need to use for the power level.
More fun.
