Amantys Delivers Next Technology Breakthrough in Product Roadmap
Amantys Ltd. announced its latest product enhancement, Amantys Power Insight™, delivering real-time power switch performance metrics through the existing control interface.
This product follows the successful launch of the Amantys Power Drive™ in November 2011, and will integrate across various application areas, including locomotive traction, medium voltage motor drives, wind turbine inverters and high voltage dc infrastructure.
Amantys Power Insight enables the export of six key measurements from the gate driver including Vce, switching time and gate drive temperature. In addition it allows remote configuration of both the gate drive resistors and the alarm limits, all whilst carrying out post-failure diagnosis on events such as over temperature and short circuits.
The technology simplifies the design-in of IGBT modules in power converters by allowing the designer to monitor and tune the assembled system without the need for time-consuming assembly and dis-assembly of the inverter. Amantys Power Insight allows development engineers to test the system and adjust gate resistor settings using the existing interface to optimize switching characteristics for their specific system needs.
Throughout the manufacturing process, Amantys Power Insight gives a simple but safe method for ensuring the correct configuration of the IGBT module and gate resistor setting to confirm the correct equipment build.
Insight–enabled gate drives incorporate extra hardware, including a microcontroller to export real time data on the performance of the system, giving constant confirmation of correct performance, fault codes and performance drift over time, providing early warning of potential IGBT failure, as well as "black box" data logging for failure analysis.
All of this is available to system designers within the current physical format of IGBT modules and gate drives, whether for new designs or a retrofit of existing systems.
Bryn Parry, CEO Amantys commented: "When we launched the Amantys Power Drive in November in 2011, we were committed to developing Amantys Power Insight in time for PCIM this year. I am delighted with the progress of this technology, and through the addition of monitoring to our gate drives, we’re already working with tier one manufacturers to simplify the design, commissioning and operation of more reliable and robust systems."
More news and information regarding the latest developments in Smart Grid electronics can be found at Darnell’s SmartGridElectronics.Net.
