voltage regulators in parallel

voltage regulators in parallel The well known 78xx series of voltage regulators are designed to produce currents up to 1 amp. In many instances, however, this may be just too low for safety"s sake and in this case an elegant solution would be to connect two regulators in parallel. This (of simple answer suffers from a major drawbackould course). The problem is that one regulator w do all the work while the other would gently tick-over. All is not lost, however, as the circuit here shows. If two ammeters are available they can be con- nected in the positions shown in the diagram. If outputs of each regulator can then be balanced with the aid of the potentiometer P1 with the result that they will both produce the same current. The decoupling capacitors must be mounted as close as physically possible to the regulators , especially C2 and C3. meters are not to hand, two short lengths of resis- 61tance wire can be used instead and the voltage drop across them can be measured with a vol...