Listen to your hosts Dave Jones & Chris Gammell talk about electronics design and the electronics industry in general. If you have any interest in electronics at all, from hobbyist/hacker/maker to engineering professional you'll find something of interest here.
Fredrik lives in Sweden, one of our first guests from there (Simone Giertz is also from Sweden originally, but now lives in the US)
KraftPowercon makes large scale Switch Mode Power Supplies (SMPS) that are in the range of 100-200 kW output.
Here is a datasheet of an example produce
There are a range of different industrial uses
HV cleaning with smokestack
Electrical Preciptator (see them working on YouTube)
High current electroplating
The high current unit can go as high as 30 kA at 10V
This is used for copper plating in PCB manufacturing
The pulse mode helps to get the plating to happen down into high aspect ratio vias.
Reverse pulse plating use sub-microscecond pulses.
These supplies also found a use in ballast water treatment on ships. The 3 phase power on ships is higher, so they need to have more margin in designs.
Safety in the lab includes plastic covers for dangerous sections, as well as the case being IP44 with front panel on. The lab gets hot because they’re often burning so much power.
Manufacturing is on site, but the PCB assemblies are done elsewhere. It’s the integration and testing.
Calibration is either done on test stands or in the units that are self calibrating.
What’s the architecture of a device like this
EMC filter
24v digital board
3 phase goes to powermodule
700-800V DC
Half bridge with IGBTs
37 kHz switching
Snubber
5-10W
Reverse recovery on the diodes
Inductor
Current sensor
Hall effect
Isolation back to the control side of the board
The control loop needs to respond within 1 pulse, which is roughly 27 uS.
Pulse module is different, it has a lot of caps and an H bridge to deliver the pulses.
Supply chain for a device like this is the “secret sauce” of the company.
Founding of company was in 1935
They received a request to fix a 1937 battery charger.
Fredrik got in touch with Chris writing about “Zephyr without the RTOS part”, trying to use similar methods that Zephyr does without taking on the entire RTOS.
He is the software manager at KraftPowercon and working on managing 40 different firmware versions.
He moved them from SVN to Git
Trying to make the implementations all modular
Autosar framework
Replicating the Zephyr API but maybe not using the whole thing
Using different interrupts
Profibus
Processor on each power control module
PRU on the AM3358 (Beaglebone Black)
Jay Carlson talking about STM32MP1
Measuring with scope
Unit testing each module
Test the output that might be going to the IGBT gate
The stack is multiple modules
KraftPowercon is looking for more people
Power factor correction (PFC)
Rick Hartley talking about differential pairs at Altium Live
Find Fredrik on LinkedIn
Or on Facebook
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