One of the areas that academic communities can exchange to support each other in upgrading and boosting research activities is the details of the core laboratory equipment that a certain technology area must have to be ready for conducting effective and up-to-date research.
My discussion here is about the equipment and apparatus that is necessary to be there in a power/electronics lab starting from scopes and passing by open architecture power electronics converter topologies, rapid control prototyping equipment, and hardware in the loop devices. The names of the pioneer companies specialized in producing such equipment to name a few of them:
- Applied Power Systems (an American firm) open architecture power converters.
- dSPACE (a German firm) specialized in HIL and RCP equipment and automotive testing equipment.
- Typhoon HIL (a Serbian firm) specialized in HIL and RCP equipment.
- Opal-RT (a Canadian firm) specialized in HIL and RCP equipment.
- Chroma (a Taiwanese firm) specialized in power supplies, power analyzers, automatic test equipment, electronic loads and a wide variety of equipment
- Tecktonics (German firm) Test & Measurement equipment
I hope that this discussion can extend to add other new equipment and new companies. Let us know what is the latest piece of equipment that has been added to your lab in the last couple of years!
I would like to know about
* voltage and current sensors.
* Programmable load and source.
1. A good band width, high sampling rate DSO (4 channel )
2. 25MHz to 100MHz differential probe (Minimum 3)
3. DC/AC current probes
4. Electronic Load
5. Programmable DC/AC source
6. LCR Meter
7. Power quality analyzer
8. Digital True RMS mutimeters
9. A good soldering station..etc
We added 2 powerful pieces of equipment to our Lab as well:
- OPAL4510 (RT-Lab, Rapid Controller Prototyping / HIL
- OPAL8660 (HIL Controller & Data Acquisition Interface
A file is attached with more details
In our lab, we use Imperix half-bridges modules (IGBT, SIC), which are ready to use with BoomBox l.t.d modular control platform.
These tools are very useful for obtaining fast tests and results.
Besides that, I think the availability of some essential tools is very important such as (Litz wires, magnetic cores, surface mounted elements,-----etc, and of course, a good soldering station).