Electronic – Lab power supply transformer relay

Switching an inductor may make it work like a boost converter, and thus temporarily generate a higher voltage.

One way of making sure that the input voltage to the LM338 converter is no higher than allowed, is to wire a high-wattage (between 600W and 5 kW) TVS diode with an appropriate clamping max voltage biased against the input voltage and ground.

Also, if you're switching on the measured/actual output voltage, then you can get into oscillation. It would be safer to switch on "desired" output voltage, and let the regulator make sure it gets there. You could perhaps feed the bias voltage from the regulator ADJ into your microcontroller with a resistive divider to achieve this. Or you could just use a comparator with a pre-set trip point to drive/un-drive the relay.

Consider this circuit of a smps circuit:

You can clearly see three windings. Right one is secondary which is producing the output. Top left is primary and bottom left is auxiliary.

Auxiliary is nothing but an additional secondary. Usually in a switching circuit, we need some low voltage power source for the working circuit. You can't power them using 220V or 110V line directly. So you are left with two options -

1) Somehow use the low voltage output which is being generated which will be a very bad idea because the sole purpose of using such a schematic is to provide galvanic isolation to the secondary side and by connecting output side to switching IC, you have defeated the purpose.

2) Make a separate low power winding just to provide enough power for the chip to run which is what we do by making an auxiliary winding. When you cut open a transformer, you will find that secondary winding will be usually made using thicker wire because it has to handle a larger current whereas auxiliary will be made using thin wire because it has to carry just small amount of current to keep the chip functioning.

Both secondary and auxiliary windings get their energy from primary winding. You can add more windings to the transformer and call them aux2, aux3, sec2, sec3 etc in case you need such an arrangement.