Out of the Box and Into the Cloud, for Component Suppliers! |
You've poured brilliant engineering ideas and tremendous design effort into your products, so they can have valuable features that are useful in broad applications. Yet these are not always well understood by your customers. Your work isn’t finished until the customer "gets it… |
by Mike Donnelly |
September 9, 2020 at 10:33 AM |
Got Current Spikes? Soft-Saturation Inductors to the Rescue! |
Design requirements often focus on steady-state performance and operating conditions. Component sizing and ratings selection, if based solely on meeting these objectives, can lead to unexpected and sometimes catastrophic results. Parts may be most severely stressed during transients that occur… |
by Mike Donnelly |
May 26, 2020 at 7:04 PM |
Managing PWM Waveforms, Part 1 - Data Reduction |
This is the first part of a three-part series on special handling of PWM waveforms. The first two parts deal with the large amount of data involved. The last part deals with precise characterization in the presence of switching cycle “noise.” I am honored to post this article, which was… |
by Mike Donnelly |
February 20, 2020 at 12:05 PM |
Electro-Hydraulic Component Modeling and System Simulation |
The SystemVision Cloud Team is happy to announce that we’re adding new models to support electro-hydraulic system development. We’ve recently added basic hydraulic elements, such as a pump, valve and cylinder (or linear actuator). We will be adding many more models in the near future, but the… |
by Mike Donnelly |
February 3, 2020 at 6:56 AM |
Is it a Wire or a Transmission Line? |
Question: When is a wire or cable a transmission line?
Answer: When it is long enough that the propagation delay gives a significant phase shift at frequencies within the bandwidth of the distributed system. In other words, if the delay impacts the dynamics of interaction between the source and… |
by Mike Donnelly |
January 27, 2020 at 9:25 PM |
Need To Tune-Up Your Network Signal Quality? Now You CAN (FD)! |
Ever since the CAN specification was released many decades ago, designers have pushed their network configurations beyond the conservative limits of the standard, driven by manufacturablity, customization flexibility and other non-technical reasons. With thorough engineering analysis, including… |
by Mike Donnelly |
January 27, 2020 at 9:15 PM |
Controlling Motors with the Talon SRX |
Do you struggle to understand how to use the Talon SRX controller effectively? What is PID and PIDF? How does feedback control work? What is feed-forward control? How are values of P, I, D, & F determined? How is the new Talon SRX "motion profile" feature supposed to be used… |
by Darrell |
January 27, 2020 at 8:54 PM |
Mechatronics Engineers … Start Your Motors! |
The PartQuest Explore Team is happy to announce that we’re adding many models to support motor and control systems development. We’ve recently added a new PMSM (Permanent Magnet Synchronous Machine) model, and updated our Induction Motor model. We will be adding Stepper and SRM (Switched Reluctance… |
by Mike Donnelly |
January 27, 2020 at 8:45 PM |
Sensor Modeling and Signal Conditioning Circuit Design for Mechatronic Systems |
PartQuest Explore provides a great design platform for sensor signal conditioning circuits, as well as for verifying sensor systems in the context of their external applications. A key feature PartQuest Explore that makes this possible is the ability to create a “just right” model of the sensor… |
by Mike Donnelly |
January 27, 2020 at 8:25 PM |
Motion Control Design: Frequency Response Modeling of a Flexible Structure |
A versatile and effective modeling capability is available in our HyperLynx product family. It uses complex-pole fitting to extract simulation-ready models from measured frequency response data. This can be useful in a wide range of engineering design applications, from system level transfer… |
by Mike Donnelly |
January 27, 2020 at 8:24 PM |
TDFS Part 3 – Impedance Measurement for Switching Converters and Power System Stability Analysis |
In this final installment of my series on TDFS (Time Domain Frequency Sweep) analysis, I’ll focus on measuring impedance vs. frequency. I’ll first demonstrate the method by showing the measurement of input impedance for a switching power converter. Then I’ll extend that method to… |
by Mike Donnelly |
January 27, 2020 at 8:02 PM |
Solving the Problems with Modeling Fuel Cells |
The Problem With Fuel Cell Models
Darrell Teegarden www.linkedin.com/in/darrellteegarden
Performing a web search for "fuel cell model" returns an encouraging number of hits. When these are pursued, however, it is difficult to find the result that many engineers are looking for -- a… |
by Darrell |
January 27, 2020 at 6:55 PM |
Need a Power Fairy? You Need Coordinated Electrical and Thermal Design! |
A colleague of mine, a thermal design engineer, once made a comment that I’ll never forget. I was simulating a power electronics circuit and I placed a scope probe on a transistor model and plotted the power dissipation. Its value was of course changing over time, as the circuit’s… |
by Mike Donnelly |
January 27, 2020 at 8:13 AM |
Get the Heat Out! … Electronic-Thermal Design Modeling |
We have recently added a number of new electro-thermal models to our Component Library. These models represent devices that are either temperature sensing/control elements, or electronic components that dissipate significant power and may require thermal analysis. These models include:
Peltier… |
by Mike Donnelly |
January 21, 2020 at 8:24 PM |
New: Explore Live Energy Harvesting Designs |
In a previous blog post, I provided a number of Energy Harvesting example designs that could be modeled and simulated in PartQuest Explore. These included electrodynamic, thermal and solar energy harvesting for Industrial IoT and Automotive applications. Subsequent to that posting, we added a rich… |
by Mike Donnelly |
January 21, 2020 at 8:02 PM |