Components Off The Shelf Research Articles

Construction and qualification of the Power Supply system of the AMS-02 Tracker detector

The AMS-02 Tracker power supply system, described in this paper, has been designed optimizing noise performances, modularity and efficiency. The power is distributed starting from a 28V line coming from the power distribution system is converted into the needed voltages by means of DC-DC converters, and for bias supply and front-end voltages is post-regulated by means of linear regulators. Components Off The Shelf (COTS) have been extensively used in the construction of this power supply, however various radiation test campaigns have been performed in order to verify the reliability of these components. The power supply architecture developed for the tracker detector has been used as a guideline for the development of the power supplies for the other detectors in the experiment.

The Power Supply System of the AMS-02 Tracker Detector

This paper describes the architecture, the performance and the qualification tests of the Tracker detector power supply system for the AMS-02 experiment. The AMS-02 experiment will measure the cosmic ray spectrum from 0.5 GeV up to several TeV in space, looking for anti-matter, dark matter and strange quark matter. The experimental apparatus will be installed in the International Space Station (ISS) in year 2008. A preliminary version of this experiment has flown in 1998 on the STS-91 shuttle flight. The power supply system of the tracker has been designed optimizing noise performances, modularity and efficiency. Power is generated starting from a 28 V line coming from the power distribution box for the entire experiment. This power is converted into the needed voltages by means of DC-DC converters, and for bias supply and front-end voltages is postregulated by means of linear regulators. Components Off The Shelf (COTS) have been extensively used in the construction of this power supply, however various radiation test campaigns have been performed in order to verify the reliability of these components. Active components were tested for total dose radiation damage and digital components were also tested for single event effects. The power supply architecture developed for the tracker detector has been used as a guideline for the development of the power supplies for the other detectors in the experiment

A fully digital real-time power system simulator based on PC-cluster

Many benefits come with the real-time simulation of electric machinery and drives. HYPERSIM, a fully digital real-time power system simulator, originally based on large parallel supercomputer, is now adapted to a new hardware platform, in order to increase its flexibility and accessibility. This paper presents a new hardware architecture, called PC-cluster, for real-time simulation of complex power system networks, including power electronics. A PC-cluster consists of several commodity PC interconnected with high-speed network. This new hardware platform for the HYPERSIM simulator is completely based on components-off-the-shelf (COTS), such as commercial motherboard, PCI input/output (I/O) board and communication board. The general implementation of the real-time parallel simulator is introduced in this paper. All aspects of the simulation, such as communication, calculation, synchronization, I/O access and acquisition, are presented in detail. To evaluate the performance of the new hardware platform in a real simulation, a complete application of electric machine drive is presented. This new hardware technology is bringing interesting benefits to power system engineers. It is now easier to have access to powerful simulation tools, in order to perform precise and complete power system studies.