ARC Simulator
Student Technician II, Automation Laboratory
Software development of an electrical arc simulator.
Spring 2001
References: Dr. Behbood Zoghi, Tim Ash (AEI)
This project, sponsored by Advanced Energy Industries, was to create a system that can emulate an electrical arc. This system will be used in the testing and development of intelligent power supplies, primarily used in the semiconductor manufacturing industry to automatically compensate for destructive arcs that occur in plasma chambers. By detecting these arcs, the power supply can reduce output power until the arc disipates and then resume normal output power, thereby minimizing the damage caused by the electrical arc. The emulator consists of three major parts: windows software to allow the user to program the desired arc pattern, a General Purpose Interface Bus (GPIB) card to program a function generator, and a coupling circuit to bridge the output of the function generator to the feedback line of the intelligent power supply. For testing purposes, an arc can be simulated by the function generator by dropping the voltage from 10Vdc to some lesser amplitude (usually 0V), and back to 10V. This will simulate a short circuit seen when an arc takes place. The Arc Simulator is capable of generating any combination of arcs ranging from 1us to 10,000 seconds, specifying the arc amplitude setpoint and arc voltage for each arc. The windows application was developed in Borland C++ Builder 5.0. This project gave me an excellent opportunity to develop skills in visual programming, and gain experience using GPIB.