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Test Equipment / Re: ACME PS2L-1000 - 1000W Electronic Load Teardown
« Last post by Phil1977 on Today at 01:18:56 pm »One maybe stupid question about big electronic loads: Why does it seem all commercial electronic loads use power transistors to dissipate everything?
In DIY-loads I usually diverted a DC-DC converter from its original use by modification of the control loop. In the end I had a DC-DC-converter that "sends" a controllable amount of power to an external dissipation device like a water kettle or incadescent lamp.
By this setup, you only need a high quality heatsink for the switching losses of the converter - the major part of the load power can be wasted in a part that can be much hotter or is easier to cool by e.g. boiling water. Sometimes I even used an e-bike battery as a "waste device" so that in the end the energy was not lost at all.
Maybe you could even connect a micro inverter like it´s used for small domestic PV-generators and recycle the power to the AC-grid.
PS: A little googling showed that many larger scale battery test loads nowadays backfeed into mains. Would have been to strange if no one else would have had this idea
In DIY-loads I usually diverted a DC-DC converter from its original use by modification of the control loop. In the end I had a DC-DC-converter that "sends" a controllable amount of power to an external dissipation device like a water kettle or incadescent lamp.
By this setup, you only need a high quality heatsink for the switching losses of the converter - the major part of the load power can be wasted in a part that can be much hotter or is easier to cool by e.g. boiling water. Sometimes I even used an e-bike battery as a "waste device" so that in the end the energy was not lost at all.
Maybe you could even connect a micro inverter like it´s used for small domestic PV-generators and recycle the power to the AC-grid.
PS: A little googling showed that many larger scale battery test loads nowadays backfeed into mains. Would have been to strange if no one else would have had this idea