Printed Circuit Board Design, Fabrication & Assembly Services

Motor Control EMI: AC Mains Conducted Emission

We do not want our product to come back from testing to find that we have failed electromagnetic interference (EMI) or conducted emissions (CE) exams. Furthermore, we do not want these noise sources to degrade our products performance, so we need to understand the mechanisms of this noise and how to minimize it. One of the most common failures is, AC mains conducted emission testing which is listed as IEC 61326-1:2005, Ed. 1 section 7 (CiSPR11:2003). The purpose of the conducted emissions test is to measure noise currents that exit the products ac power cord to be sure the currents are ...

Do-nuts plus Engineers = Success

It was a typical Friday afternoon as everyone was rushing to finish their work load to get home early. As the day came to a close, my inbox alert pops up showing a meeting invite for early Monday morning from our Project Manager. Out of curiosity of the details contained within, I read the E-mail that was sent to all the Project Team members. It read, “If you like donuts, attend the meeting.” [1] Unfortunately, I don’t like donuts, but a certain anxiety came over me in wanting to know, what could the topic of discussion be? I could only think ...

A piece of wire and a diode can reduce huge cost

Today we will discuss one very useful trick to improve and reduce the overall cost and reliability of a popular unit in the motor control industry. As we all know, as depicted in figure -1, a standard topology of a fractional motor controllers electronics consists of, 1-ϕ AC input, step-down transformer, bridge rectifier and linear regulators to supply the drivers and micro-controller. [1] Normally bus voltage is in the range of 40VDC of delivery current at 5A to 15A. I have seen this standard implementation in almost 80% of motor drives I’ve come across. There is nothing wrong with this configuration ...

Next Generation Motor Drives

Over the last decade, the semiconductor industry has made great advancements at the component level, especially in power handling capacity, speed and compact size. Due to availability of right power electronics and logic controllers, motor Drives [1] controllers have significantly progressed achieving tighter motion control and increased reliability to different motor types. However Brush-less DC Motors (BLDC) are becoming the preferred choice for low to medium power needs due to its mechanical reliability. There are many popular electronic products out there using BLDC drives that are not updated to the latest innovations in microprocessor, power electronics and motor control loop algorithms. ...