What is regulated linear DC power supply?

When we received this project, firstly we should know the definition and functions of the regulated DC power supply.

A regulated DC power supply can be also named a (voltage) regulator. It consists of a embedded circuit which may be a simple "feed-forward" design or may include negative feedback control loops. The circuit should use some electronic components, like resistors, capacitors, zener diodes, diodes, transistors, operational amplifier and so on.

Depending upon the designing of the circuit, a regulated power supply can be used to regulate one or more AC or DC voltages. However, this project only focuses on the regulated linear DC power supply. The designed circuit of this project should be able to power the load which must be operated within certain power supply limits. The output from the regulated linear DC power supply should be able to be adjusted linearly within a certain range and nearly always DC voltage regardless of the AC ripple from the input.

Actually, voltage regulators have been widely applied in variety of fields, from electronic products to electrical systems. For instance, if without voltage regulators in the computer power supplies to stabilize the DC voltages, the processors of the computers will make bugs and generate error and irregular signals to the following system units, then the system of the computer will be in disorder and the whole computer cannot work normally.