Potentiometer is a common electronic component. Today, we will introduce several commonly used potentiometers on the market and their advantages and disadvantages.
1. Synthetic carbon film potentiometer
The resistor of the synthetic carbon film potentiometer is made of a suspension of carbon film, graphite, quartz powder and organic powder, and is coated on glass glaze fiberboard or adhesive tape. The manufacturing process is simple and it is currently the most widely used potentiometer. The advantages of synthetic carbon film potentiometer are: wide resistance range, high resolution, can be made into various types of potentiometers, long life, low price, and many models. Disadvantages are: not too high power, poor high temperature resistance and moisture resistance, and low resistance potentiometers are not easy to make.
2. Organic solid potentiometer
Organic solid potentiometer is a new type of potentiometer. It uses the method of heating and plastic pressing to press organic resistance powder into the groove of the insulator. Compared with carbon film potentiometer, organic solid potentiometer has the advantages of good heat resistance, high power, high reliability and good wear resistance. However, the temperature coefficient is large, the dynamic noise is large, the moisture resistance is poor, the manufacturing process is complex, and the resistance accuracy is poor. It is used to adjust voltage and current in miniaturized, highly reliable, and highly wear-resistant electronic equipment and AC and DC circuits.
3. Metal film potentiometer
The metal film potentiometer is made of several materials such as metal composite film, metal oxide film, metal alloy film, and oxide button film deposited on a ceramic substrate through vacuum technology. Advantages: good heat resistance. High resolution, small distributed inductance and distributed capacitor, and very low noise electromotive force. Disadvantages: poor wear resistance, small resistance range (10Ω-100KΩ).
4. Wire wound potentiometer
The wire wound potentiometer is made by using constantan wire or nickel-chromium alloy wire as a resistor and winding it on an insulating skeleton. Advantages of wire wound potentiometer: small contact resistance, high precision, and small temperature coefficient. Disadvantages: poor resolution, low resistance, and poor high-frequency characteristics. It is mainly used as a voltage divider, transformer, instrument, zero adjustment, and adjustment of working point.
5. Digital potentiometer
The digital potentiometer eliminates the moving parts and is a semiconductor integrated circuit. Advantages: high adjustment accuracy, no noise, extremely long working life, no mechanical wear, data read/write, configuration register and data register, multi-level quantity storage function, easy software control, small size, easy to assemble. It is suitable for home theater systems, audio surround control, audio amplifiers and cable TV equipment.
