Innovatia

Innovative Designs and Design Know-How

Pulsed-Power Electronics

Pulse Amplifiers

Power pulse amplifiers deliver accurate current or voltage pulses for pyrotechnic devices and capacitance-discharge applications. Besides articles on power pulse generator design principles, two pulse amplifier designs are covered in detail, with MathCAD design programs, designware files and boards.

Chargers

Switching converters that charge batteries or capacitor banks offer unusual design challenges. Two design case studies are covered in detail in separate reports: a low-power (5 W) flyback capacitance-bank charger and a high-power (750 W) half-bridge C-bank charger that uses a novel Innovatia zero-power-switching circuit topology. Included are application design notes and MathCAD design programs. Prototype hardware and designware files are also available.

Ultrasonic Imager Technology

	Single-board computer-based subsystem
	Sharp image from A (1-D) or B (2-D polar) scans
	Novel bidirectional scan synchronization and probe position detection
	Digitized output drives polar-to-raster scan converter
	For more information on licensing or buying this design, Inquire.

PG1 Pyrotechnic Pulse Generator

Motor-Drives

Sensorless PMS Motor-Drives

Field-oriented step-motor control eliminates the resonances and loss of dynamic control due to open-loop microstepping of step-motors. The motor instead behaves like a dc brush motor, even when changing speed. Instead of pulsing the rotor from one equilibrium position (step) to the next, field-oriented or vector  control continually maintains correct drive phase at all rotor positions to produce constant, maximum torque.

Vector-summed precision phase control  is a novel application of leading-edge motor theory that has led to a breakthrough in accurate six-step PMS motor control for cost-sensitive applications. This tech report describes in detail how step advancement is achieved by sensing motor phase directly, from its induced terminal voltages, and combining winding voltages vectorially to produce waveforms that correctly commutate the motor at their zero-crossings. The result is more and smoother torque and requires few parts to implement.

Dynamometer Design 

Benchtop dynos for motor characterization are specialized and costly instruments, limiting their availability. This report describes how to construct a dyno from low-cost components. The approach uses either a brush or PMS motor as the active load, as a generator. Once characterized, this generator also functions as a torque and speed sensor. Included in the e-booklet are the detailed mechanical drawings of dyno prototype constructed using this approach. 90 pages.

Gear-Motor Controllers

The design of electrical actuators/controllers for gear-motors, used to actuate high-torque, low-speed mechanical devices such as quarter-turn ball and multi-turn valves, or solar trackers, is explained in this e-booklet, based on two designs: an optically-sensed, single-direction controller, and the VC1, which uses Hall-effect devices and adjustable-position magnets to set opened and closed positions or limits. Articles explain the detailed designs, give test waveforms, and describe applications problems and faults to avoid. Designware includes a PC parallel-port interface program, PAL/GAL programs, gear-motor and magnet component information, ball-valve load characteristics, and commercial valve info.

	Quarter-turn ball-valve or multi-turn valve fluidic control
	Position control of low-speed, high-torque mechanics
	Computer interface or manual control
	Single board prototype hardware mounts on Grainger line of gear motors

Power Conversion

Magnetics Design

Design your own magnetics for switching converters!

This suite of MathCAD programs comes with explanations and background theory. Fill in numbers for the highlighted quantities, select core and wire types, and iterate until the design is optimized to your satisfaction. The program maximizes primary-to-secondary-winding power transfer and calculates primary and secondary winding-window areas to maintain uniform winding loss in the window. 360 kbytes compressed.

Rocketry

Fundamentals of Rocketry

This e-book covers the basic theory of flight dynamics, propulsion, structural design, rocket electronics, mission planning, and more. It develops the basic formulas of flight, rocket engine design, instrumentation and control, assuming only a knowledge of high-school mathematics. The basic principles of flight mechanics, structural mechanics, and thermodynamics are presented. This book equips the reader to engage in rocket activity at an amateur or low-end commercial level, and in design and development of liquid-propellant launch vehicles and missions. Hundreds of illustrations and equations; 4.5 megabytes; 3.7 Mbytes compressed.

For rocket components, see:

Quarter-Turn Valve Controller

Huron Single-Board Data Acquisition and Control

Innovatia

© Innovatia, 2007. All rights reserved. JUL07 Version