2 Cool 50 Watt Inverter Circuits for Students and Hobbyists

A 50 watt inverter circuit might look quite trivial, but it can serve some useful purposes to you. When outdoors, this small power house can be used for operating small electronic gadgets, soldering iron, table top radios, incandescent lights, fans etc.

Let’s learn 2 homemade 50 watt inverter circuit designs, beginning with a brief description regarding the circuit diagram and its functioning:

Design#1: How it Works

The first 50 W circuit may be understood with the following points:

Referring to the figure below, transistors T1 and T2 along with the other R1, R2, R3 R4, C1 and C2 together form a simple astable multivibrator (AMV) circuit.

A transistor multivibrator circuit basically is composed of two symmetrical half stages, here its formed by the left and the right hand side transistor stages which conduct in tandem or in simple words the left and the right stages conduct alternately in a kind of a perpetual “motion”, generating a continuous flip flop action.

The above action is responsible of creating the required oscillations for our inverter circuit. The frequency of the oscillation is directly proportional to the values of the capacitors or/and the resistors at the base of each transistor.

Lowering the values of the capacitors increases the frequency while increasing the values of the resistors decreases the frequency and vice versa. Here the values are chosen so as to produce a stable frequency of 50 Hz.

Readers, who wish to alter the frequency to 60 Hz, may easily do it by just changing the capacitor values appropriately.

Transistors T3 and T4 are placed at the two output arms of the AMV circuit. These are high gain; high current Darlington paired transistors, used as the output devices for the present configuration.

The frequency from the AMV is fed to the base of T3 and T4 alternately which in turn switch the transformer secondary winding, dumping the entire battery power in the transformer winding.

This results in a fast magnetic induction switching across the transformer windings, resulting the required the mains voltage at the output of the transformer.

Parts Required

 You will require the following components for making this 50 watt homemade inverter circuit:

General purpose PCB = cut into the desired size, approximately 5 by 4 inches should suffice.

Battery: 12 volts, Current not less than 10 AH.

Transformer = 9 – 0 – 9 volts, 5 Amps, Output winding may be 220 V or 120 volts as per your country specifications

Sundries: Metallic box, fuse holder, connecting cords, sockets etc

Testing and Setting Up the Circuit

 After you finish making the above explained simple inverter circuit, you may do the testing of the unit in the following manner:

Initially do not connect the transformer or battery to the circuit.

Using a small DC power supply power the circuit.
If everything is done rightly, the circuit should start oscillating at the rated frequency of 50 Hz.

You can check this by connecting the prods of a frequency meter across T3’s or T4’s collector and the ground. The positive of the prod should go to the collector of the transistor.

If you don’t own a frequency meter, never mind, you do a rough checking by connecting a headphone pin across the above explained terminals of the circuit. If you hear a loud humming sound, will prove that your circuit is generating the required frequency output.

Now it’s time to integrate the battery and the transformer to the above circuit.

Connect everything as shown in the figure.

Connect a 40 watt incandescent lamp at the output of the transformer. And switch ON the battery to the circuit.

The bulb will immediately come ON brightly…..your homemade 50 watt inverter is ready and may be used as desired by for powering many small appliances whenever required.

Design#2: 50 Watt Mosfet Inverter Circuit

The circuit explained above involved power transistors now let's see how the same concept may be utilized with mosfets making the configuration much easier and straightforward, yet more robust and powerful.

Rest of the stages are pretty much the same, in the earlier circuit we saw the involvement of  a transistor based astable multivibrator for the generation of the required 50 Hz oscillations, here too we have incorporated a transitor operated AMV.

The earlier circuit had a couple of 2N3055 transistors at the output and as we all know driving power transistors efficiently requires proportionate amount of base drive, relative to the load current, because transistors depend on current drive rather than voltage drive, in contrast to mosfets.

Meaning, as the proposed load becomes higher, the base resistance of the relevant output transistor also gets dimensioned accordingly for enabling optimal amount of current to the base of the transistors,

Due to this obligation, in the previous design a additional driver stage had to be incorporated for facilitating better drive current to the 2N3055 transistors.

However when it comes to mosfets, this necessity becomes completely insignificant.

As can be seen in the given diagram, the AMV stage is instantly preceded by the relevant gates of the mosfets, because mosfets have very high input resistance, which means the AMV transistors wouldn't be unnecessarily loaded and therefore the frequency from the AMVwouldn't be distorted due to the integration of the power devices.

The mosfets are alternately switched, which in turn switches the battery voltage/current inside the secondary winding of the transformer.

The output of the transformer gets saturated delivering the expected 220V to the connected loads.

Parts List

Transformer = 9-0-9V, 8 amp
Battery = 12V,10AH

Video showing the Testing process of the 50 watt inverter circuit: