Thread: Transformer design worked example

I am considering putting a step by step transformer design example on my website. It may help answer a few of the questions that come up on here.

As this forum contains my target audiance, and time is valuable, is this of interest?

grim,

I think with your knowledge and experience it is a great idea and good of you to do this...

Many years ago I had a book that contained design info for transformers...I could do with it some times...

Would your design data cater just for iron cored tranformers or does it cater for toroidal types as well?

I was thinking of a fully detailed 50VA design - the basic principles are the same for a 5va and a 500va. I will link to design data from various manufacturers, maybe with snap shots of designs for other VA ratings.

I willl look at toroidals later.

Originally Posted by grim

I was thinking of a fully detailed 50VA design - the basic principles are the same for a 5va and a 500va. I will link to design data from various manufacturers, maybe with snap shots of designs for other VA ratings.

I willl look at toroidals later.

Excellent...

IIRC, the VA rating is based on cross sectional area of the core...how the number of turns for the primary( based on a 230v ac supply) are calculated is the bit that's missing for me..

I look forward to your tutorial..

I think a helper spreadsheet would also be a good idea.

i have looked at designing in Excel, as I currently use a program I wrote way back in the 90's. It runs on Datastar, which is a simple DOS database program, originally designed to run on an 8086 from a 5 1/4" disk.......

when we first ran it on the accounts department 286, everyone in the office was amazed how fast it computed. LESS THAN 30 SECONDS to do the design calculations!!!!

same program still runs on the latest chips, hiding away in the corner of my ram, and completes the same calculations in fractions of seconds.

thanks to dos2usb printer software, it lives on


what it isn't is a transformer design program though. it's more like a super programmable calculator, that a transformer designer can use to design with. Uses the same layout as the foolscap books I hand wrote my first designs in.

unless it's your job designing transformers, then calculating by hand will be fine.

the worked example will show where I get the data from to do the design, so other people can do their own.

it's really intended as more of a 'how do they design transformers' show and tell

Suppliers and data will of course be European, but the formulas and theories will work gloabally

I prefer OpenOffice.org spreadsheet myself as it's totally protable and will work on any system but I understand that many Windows users who already have MS Office are probably happy with it and don't want to download another huge program just for some spreadsheet.

Would Google Spreadsheet work? No software to install and updates would be a breeze.

Google Speadsheet can save in OpenOffice and Excel format.

it's just some lookup tables, that look up the data an engineer would look up in catalogues and some pretty simple calcs. the worked example will show where to get the data and run through the calcs.

if you can handle V=IxR you can do this. damn, makes my job sound easy. lol