High Current 12V | 13.8V DC Power Supply

[requim]

I'm thinking that I want to try building a high current 12V or 13.8V DC power supply (100+ amps) so I can power car stereo equipment with it.  I've looked around a little bit and found a couple of schematics, but haven't really found anything that I like.  Any suggestions?

[Simon]

that is a lot of current, You be best buying an off the shelf SMPS maybe a few beefy computer PSU's ?

[requim]

It is alot of current, and the idea did cross my mind.  Here are a couple of the links/schematics I saw for building one:

http://sound.westhost.com/project77.htm
http://www.aaroncake.net/circuits/supply2.asp

The other thing I'd like is to find a nice professional looking case (19" rackmount?) and mount an LCD or something to display current, voltage, etc.

[requim]

Here's a silly question.   I could buy a couple of old server hot swappable power supplies since those are very reliable and quite inexpensive and very compact. Would I be able to put them in series (or is it parallel?) to get up to 2400 watts ( 200 amps)?

[alm]

Does the stereo equipment actually draw 200A or are these marketing amps (ILS power)?

[Psi]

yeah, i think you'll find the average current is probably more like 10-20A.

In which case a 10-20A power supply float charging a battery or large capacitor would probably work fine.

[hacklordsniper]

Does the stereo equipment actually draw 200A or are these marketing amps (ILS power)?

I also consider author is mixing power draw and PMPO

[Simon]

yes I was about to start work when I posted and was wondering the same thing, 1+ KW of audio power is not something you would actually want unless your trying to blow your house down. A few watts of power can be heard all over a house, what are you doing with it ?

200A out of a car will kill most car systems it would drain the battery fast and be 3X the typical max alternator output

[requim]

At the moment the only thing I plan on hooking up to it is an amp that uses two 30 amp fuses on it.  When I purchased the amplifier years ago I had intended to purchase one or two more which would have easily put me over 100 amps I only want to hook it up to test it outside of the car. If you would like to see the owners manual for the specific amp I am talking about here it is:

http://vault.alpine-usa.com/products/documents/PDX-4.150.PDF

However I was only using the car stereo equipment as an example.  I may also like to use it to connect DC powered computers at a later point in time.  Google does this inside their many data centers and I think it would be nice to have a high amperage dc power source that I can use for multiple devices if I want.

Is it possible to take two server hot swappable supplies and use them for a combined 2400 watt supply (200 amp)?  An easy way to do this would be to just take the power supply hotswap cage along with the two power supplies and then use the external leads on the cage to run the necessary jacks and circuitry.

[hacklordsniper]

Why would you paralell server power supplies, you could use every one for itself powering a part of the equipment. Paralleling can be done but not so simple.

[Simon]

if you have more than one amp then power them seperately, it will work out easier and cheaper in the long run. You can parallel psu's but need to make sure they support it first

[sonicj]

when i worked in car audio we used large Astron power supplies in parallel for our demo room. i think they were 50A x 2 or 3. also had a battery on float as a buffer which helped a bunch.
-sj

[NiHaoMike]

yes I was about to start work when I posted and was wondering the same thing, 1+ KW of audio power is not something you would actually want unless your trying to blow your house down. A few watts of power can be heard all over a house, what are you doing with it ?

1kW peak might be overkill for music (at home at least) but would add a lot of realism to movies. 1kW RMS for more than a few seconds would be insane.

There's actually a DSP trick of starting bass notes really high power for a few cycles and then dropping off in a controlled manner to give the illusion of more powerful bass with less average power usage.

[Achilles]

As far as I have seen that, above 50A it gets quite expensive. We had a winch for a Balloon which was operated at a 12V car winch that consumed up to 150A (with very low load on it). We bought an 380V winch because that solution has been much less expensive.....
...So if you really want to blast your brain out of your head it may get expensive (transformer, capacitors).......well, but I think there are People around here with more experience in high energy circuits.

...if you really put together that beast I wanna see (hear) it 

[Chet T16]

One of the brothers used to have a sound system in his car that would hit over 150dB...I'd love to know how much power that was taking. It had 12 amplifiers, 2 big batteries and some big caps.