Research and Development of an Automatic Test System for Power Supplies

Abstract

With rising attention to the quality of AC/DC, DC/DC power supply, in response to the verification of design and production of power supply, and to ensure the quality demand of power supply, power supply automatic testing system is thus developed. Power supply testing systems with features of higher accuracy, lower cost and shorter testing time should be designed to guarantee the quality of power supply to win high level of customer trust. This testing system uses Labview software to establish an open platform with built-in testing program editors of considerable freedom and convenience to allow engineers to rapidly edit testing programs for various projects and design various customized testing items. This study develops the unified instrument control interface for various testing demands of instruments and equipments made by different manufacturers. With software operating panel record functions, the system can record each testing step and furthermore edit. This study proposes the Test System Performance Index to facilitate customers to evaluate and compare the performance capabilities of various power supply testing systems. Higher Test System Performance Index indicates better performance of the testing systems. By comparison, the test system performance index of the testing system and Chroma 8000 are 3.36 and 0.164, respectively. This indicates that the testing system has definite advantages including more testing functional items, shorter testing time, low manufacturing cost, and supportability of various types of equipments, thus making it a system with great potentials.