Design Project #2
(Last Modified: 04 November 2010 06:11:44 PM )
AUDIO AMPLIFIER
Input Signal Source:
Input Specifications:
Output Specifications:
Available Power Supply:
Since this is an audio amplifier it is generally accepted that good signal fidelity is an important consideration. However, power efficiency cannot be ignored. Therefore your design will need to balance these two issues off of each other. To explore this, implement a Class AB amplifier that allows you to adjust the amount of "Class A"-like and "Class B"-like behavior that it exhibits.
For comparison purposes, you should calculate the power efficiency you would expect to achieve if you were to use a Class A amplifier as a function of signal amplitude.
You want to characterize your amplifier in terms of its performance in three areas - gain, power efficiency, and total harmonic distortion - as a function of three independent variables - signal amplitude, frequency, and deadband width. The deadband width serves as a measure of how much Class A verses Class B behavior you have.
It is up to you to determine how to "best" present your data - there are a number of ways. You should looking for relationships among the data, draw conclusions about the amplifier performance, and then present the data in such a way that it clearly supports your conclusions without the reader having to draw a lot of inferences.
Team Scoring
You may work on this project in a team of no more than three people. You will probably learn more if you work along but this isn't necessarily true for everyone. Your report needs to indicate which portions of the project each person worked on. You may break this up as you see fit based on how your group ended up apportioning the various tasks. However, I also need some sort of insight into the amount of effort contributed by each team member to the project as a whole. So each person on the team will be expected to turn in (separate from the report) a sheet giving their assessment of the relative effort put forth by each member of the team - including themselves. By turning this in separately you do not have to let anyone (other than me) know how you scored each person's efforts.
Your score will be a number from 0 to 100 that reflects your opinion of what fraction of the total work was done by each person. There are a couple of caveats here. First, the sum of everyone's score cannot exceed 100. Second, you can't simply assign each person equal credit and be done with it. In the tradition of companies such as Lincoln Electric, you may parcel out your 100 points pretty much as you see fit as long as no two peoples' scores are within 5 points of each other. This forces you to rank order people which is something that you will have to do at some point in your career.
These scores will have a minor impact on your grade - the final ten points of your score will be apportioned based on the fraction of the work you are credited with by your peers. This also means that, all else being equal, a person that works on the project by themselves will receive a slightly higher grade than someone that works with a partner who would, in turn, receive a slightly higher grade than someone that works in a team of three. But that not only seems reasonable and equitable, it's also how it works in "the real world" were a project is paid so much money and that money gets distributed among the people that worked on the project - the more people, the less money that each person gets.