In the devel­op­ment of intrin­si­cal­ly safe devices, the pre­cise cal­cu­la­tion of the pulse load on Zen­er diodes is essen­tial, espe­cial­ly for devices oper­at­ing with mains volt­age. In this arti­cle, you will learn through an exam­ple how the cal­cu­la­tion can be car­ried out accu­rate­ly.

As an engi­neer or tech­ni­cian, you are often faced with the chal­lenge of car­ry­ing out cal­cu­la­tions, doc­u­ment­ing them prop­er­ly and pro­vid­ing the results in a form that is avail­able in the long term and can be used flex­i­bly. It was the same for me when I start­ed my own busi­ness and had to car­ry out cal­cu­la­tions for my cus­tomers’ doc­u­men­ta­tion. At that time, I was already famil­iar with the usu­al pro­grammes such as Excel or Math­cad, but these had their lim­i­ta­tions in terms of read­abil­i­ty and exporta­bil­i­ty. I also did a lot of cal­cu­la­tions with my pock­et cal­cu­la­tor (greet­ings to all Casio FX-991 users), but the effort involved in doc­u­men­ta­tion and the sus­cep­ti­bil­i­ty to errors is sim­ply too high. After a bit of research and try­ing out var­i­ous tools, I came across Cal­cpad — a pow­er­ful, yet lean tool that I would­n’t want to be with­out for my work. I’ve grown so fond of the pro­gramme that I’ve been sup­port­ing the devel­op­er (Hi Ned!) for a while now and am hap­py to rec­om­mend it to my clients, where it’s already being used exten­sive­ly by a num­ber of devel­op­ers.