I am an Electrical Engineering undergraduate student who usually falls behind electronics and from my early days, I was fascinated by all electronic stuff and what goes into making(breaking) them. I remember breaking down things to see what's in and realizing that I understood nothing with the complement of wrecking the stuff and losing it. If you ever have broken into something and couldn't fix it back, leave me a message and let's discuss. I have a lot more of those here. My areas of interest include Embedded Systems, Circuit Design, Analog/Power and Sensors. Occasionally, RF and Quantum stuffs fascinate me (yes, the Starlink, 5G and CERN). Apart, I work as an Embedded Hardware intern with a CleanTech startup for developing technological solutions to help restore the air around us.
Introduction:
Over here coming to the Magnetics, they're very sneaky. The math involved is eyeworming. It's all over here, here and wherever, with the names of a number of physicists who came in and contributed. I(we) have been using those as integrated systems all the time. I had learned about these from an academic level and don't have real hands-on design experience which now leads my interest to try out this stuff. The posting of this design challenge really invoked me and made me think about magnetics a little more and surprisingly got some interesting plans to explore these areas. When it comes to making plans, nothing flashed to mind and after listening to the Logical Song(robogary yeah, I took it seriously) either nothing flashed still or everything I see seems makeable and gets curious.
I am planning to have an experimentation and building project on discrete power converters with a mix of educational, design and testing aspects. I came across some nice references on power converters and design one from TI and ADI which would help on my exploration path [1] Power Topologies Handbook (ti.com) [2] Basic Linear Design Seminar - Chapter 9 (analog.com)
The experimentation kit has a spectrum of components for designing with magnetics and I am planning to use these radial inductor parts for designing the buck-convertor stage:
[1] High Current Choke, 10µH
[2] Inductor, 100 µH
Designing of isolated flyback step down power converter. For this, I am planning to use these parts as a flyback transformer:
[1] Pulse Transformer, 300µH
[2] Pulse, Transformer, 250µH
Noise filtering is essential for this type of discrete design to be reliable or else components may bleed from all sides. For this, I am planning to use these chokes on the input/output sides:
[1] Common Mode Choke, 12.5 µH
[2] Common Mode Choke, 7.5 µH
Overall I believe this kit will help me in full-stack to design a DC-DC power convertor and I'll test, compare its performance with commercial off the shelf components. I am compressing everything into 2 blogs and the next blog will be hands-on with the magnetics and some copper clad prototyping beauty! See you there 