ACCELERATED AGING OF A SWITCHING POWER SUPPLY PROTOTYPE

Author

Michael J. Hibbard

Graduation Semester and Year

2018

Language

English

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science in Electrical Engineering

Department

Electrical Engineering

First Advisor

Ali Davoudi

Second Advisor

Haleh Hadavand

Abstract

The LVPS (Low Voltage Power Supply) is a switching power supply custom designed for the ATLAS Tile Calorimeter at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva Switzerland. Over one thousand of these LVPS, also called ’bricks’, will be produced for an upgrade cycle of all the detector electronics of the experiment. The responsibility of the technical design and manufacturing of these LVPS bricks has been supported by Dr. Hadavand’s ATLAS group at UT Arlington. As part of supporting the manufacturing process, a test station has been designed and prototyped to accelerate the aging of these brick past their infancy period. The accelerated aging of these bricks is also referred to as a “burn-in” process. In the accelerated aging, or burn-in station, a LVPS brick is subjected to a stressed environment where the load and temperature are both elevated. Different thermal systems were considered during the design, including utilizing the Peltier- Seebeck effect for the station. Previous legacy burn-in type stations utilized a water cooling circuit to maintain the temperature of the bricks and to sink power from the output load of the bricks. The new design has eliminated this water circuit and instead utilizes a forced convection-cooled electronic load. Each individual brick also iv sits on top of its own heat sink, which is also force convection-cooled to regulate the temperature of each individual brick.

Keywords

LVPS, Tilecal, Burn-in

Disciplines

Electrical and Computer Engineering | Engineering

License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike 4.0 International License.

Comments

Degree granted by The University of Texas at Arlington

Recommended Citation

Hibbard, Michael J., "ACCELERATED AGING OF A SWITCHING POWER SUPPLY PROTOTYPE" (2018). Electrical Engineering Theses. 384.
https://mavmatrix.uta.edu/electricaleng_theses/384