Electrical – Switched-mode power supply Questions

Is there any danger in bonding the DC- output to Ground with a short wire, to ensure my circuit ground is also referencing the home ground? I'm not sure simply letting the outputs float is wise,

Assuming the power supply is properly built either is fine.

Side-note: I have an after-market laptop supply that's two-prong... it works either way, but if I plug it in one way the metal trim on the laptop has an interesting "buzz" to the touch. Not shocking, but definitely noticeable. I suspect that when it's plugged in the right way the output ground is weakly referencing neutral, and the "buzzy" way has the output ground weakly referencing line voltage (it's floating - it'd be quite a bit more than buzzy otherwise). The OEM supply with the 3-prong plug? Fully grounded to the shield of the DC power cord.

Power supplies without an earth connection often have problems like this, especially as they get larger.

Capacitors have to be placed between input and output to control EMI. In an unearthed design this ends up with the output being "weakly referenced" to the input. How weak that reference is (or to put it another way how big the "touch current" is) depends on the size of the capacitors. Unfortunately there is a tricky compromise here, bigger caps are better at suppressing EMI but produce larger "touch currents". Larger power supplies tend to suffer worse from this than smaller ones (this is why laptop PSUs from reputable brands are usually earthed while phone chargers are usually not).

In an earthed design this can be mitigated either by tying the output to ground (pretty much universal in in desktop PC power supplies, occasionally seen in laptop supplies) or by splitting the EMI suppression capacitors into two parts, one from output to earth and one from input to earth.

A typical distribution network in Australia will look something like the below.

The "MV" section is a delta-connected "three-wire" system, so you are correct in asserting that there is no neutral wire. However, there is a path for neutral or "zero-sequence" currents to flow to ground, via the earthing 'zig-zag' transformer that is installed for this purpose. (The reasons for installing a earthing transformer deserve a separate question and answer.)

There are a few phenomena that may give rise to neutral current on a MV transmission line, but unbalanced LV loads, which cause a current to flow in the LV star-point/neutral, don't cause MV neutral current.

Why is that?

The picture above shows a delta HV, grounded-star LV system. There is a single-phase load which draws 1 unit (1 p.u.) of current from LV winding 1, with the current returning via the LV neutral.

What happens on the HV?

Each of the transformer's HV and LV windings are magnetically coupled by iron cores, so that the law of "amp-turns balance" must apply. I.e. conservation of energy applies between the pairs of HV and LV windings, HV1-LV1, HV2-LV2, and HV3-LV3.

That means that a 1 p.u. current on winding LV 1 must be balanced out by a 1 p.u. current on winding HV1. And since no current flows in LV2 or LV3, no current may flow in HV2 or HV 3 either.

By Kirchoff's Current Law, the 1 p.u. current in Winding HV1 must be sourced from HV line L1 and HV line L2. That is:

For a delta-HV, grounded-star-LV system, single-phase LV loads appear as phase-to-phase loads on the HV system.

This answers your original question: no matter how unbalanced the load on the LV side, no neutral current will flow on the HV side, so no neutral wire is needed.

This leads to the question of: "If no neutral wire is needed on the delta-connected system, why do we bother putting an earthing transformer on it?"

A couple of reasons I can think of - though I am uncertain on these, so don't quote me here...

1. Without a connection to earth, the delta network would float relative to ground and might be at any arbitrary potential relative to ground. I.e. the MV system could rise up to 132,000V above ground voltage. The earthing transformer is needed to tie the MV system to ground and keep it from floating to dangerous voltages.
2. 'Neutral' zero-sequence currents do flow on the MV network, i.e. from capacitive line charging current. (Edit 2015-09-22: The charging current is balanced under normal conditions.) The earthing transformer gives these zero-sequence currents a place to go.
3. The earthing transformer will be the most attractive return path for any short-circuit fault current resulting from a line-ground fault. So it's an attractive place to put a earth-fault detection relay.