Ho Tong Chol, a researcher at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, has developed DC-DC chopper experimental equipment, a part of a power electronics integrated laboratory table. It is designed to enable experiments on typical DC-DC converters ― Buck, Boost and Buck-Boost.
It can easily get an operational waveform at any point thanks to the terminals placed on the front-plate, it is supported by AC 220V as main power source, and the circuit diagrams of the front-plate are intuitive and plain enough to provide users with convenient environment for experiments on a certain converter.
This equipment, composed of power supply, control block, driving circuit, main circuit, load and filter, is useful for raising or dropping static DC 12V and for measuring some parameters such as duty cycle, voltage and current ripple rate, instantaneous value, mean value, etc.
The control block using current typed PWM integrated circuit SG3525 compares the carrier in 32.5kHz with DC voltage(0~3.3V) before it generates a PWM pulse at that comparison position. This process is observed at the terminals.
Additionally, since it includes a soft-starting circuit, you can increase the duty cycle smoothly so that no shock current flows into the main switch even when it starts on the maximum duty cycle.
The control range of duty cycle is 0.2 to 0.8.
The control block is also available for the control of a transformer isolated DC-DC converter since it has two ground separated power supplies, which is useful for the experiment on a half-bridge DC-DC converter.
The driving circuit guarantees a reliable and safe switch of the main device. The driving circuit is fed from unipolar power source.
The main circuit consists of a main switching device, a reactor, FRD, a capacitor and a current sensing resistor. The load is a resistor in 200Ω and it can also include a filter when necessary.
The newly-developed experimental equipment is useful to students, researchers and teachers who major in power electronics.
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