Electronic – 150V voltage follower

adcamplifierbufferoperational-amplifier

I am working on a datalogger to measure the voltage of a series of solar modules. I have 4 solar modules in series, let say 35V each. I am using an ADS1115 for the measurements. First I wanted to do differential measurements, but this is not possible as the voltage between the some of the pins of the ADS will exceed the max.

Now I will something simple, reference the series solar modules to the the measurement circuit and measure the voltage from the divider as in the drawing:

Simple voltage divider measurement circuit

I want to add a voltage follower before the the voltage divider in order to not load the sources in a different way. The problem is I cannot find a (cheap) op amp to do this, that is rated above 150V. Is there a reason for this? I there another way to achieve a nice way to measure the voltage in series? how is it done on high voltage battery packs for example?

Best Answer

A simple solution which also has approximately matched loading at the cells is:

schematic

simulate this circuit – Schematic created using CircuitLab

The resistance seen by each cell is just over 1M and the output span of all the amplifiers is 0 to 4V where 4V is the nominal maximum for each cell at 35V.

Given that this is a low speed application, a very cheap quad amp could be used (beware of rail to rail input devices - the 150k input resistance for output 1 amplifier can cause issues unless it is internally steered and not just overlapping input stages).