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How to build a hybrid solar/wind energy harvester?

DC motor control with the mosfet switch board

Although, there is no such thing as a general purpose mosfet switch board because of the wide variations in application specific load (resistive, capacitive, inductive or mixed) characteristics, we were able to investigate and demonstrate DC motor control with our prototype board. Then, we performed the same tests on the energy2switch board. The brushed DC […]

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Current limiting with PWM

For particular applications, such as our energy harvester or at least the battery charger part of it, the ability to control the current is an essential property. We must emphasize that the presented method will limit the average current; the instantaneous current might be higher. So, although it works well for our particular application, it […]

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Coming Soon

Finally, we are almost there. Our first product – a joint development result of cooperation between IACS and RTOS.BE – is about to be commercialized. The Energy2Switch is a DC switch board with 2 channels rated up to 50V and 40A. Continuous power is limited at 1500W per channel, which boils down to 40A @ […]

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Dual channel power switching: testing different PWM configurations

Switching power between battery and dump load is an important functionality of a charge controller. Switching fast by means of PWM allows for efficient battery charging: the battery (bank) is charged with an appropriate algorithm (bulk, absorption, float, pulse) while unnecessary energy is diverted to a dump load. Since relays are not well-suited for fast PWM switching, […]

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Charging a deep-cycle battery via low-side mosfet switching: the hard way

Introduction The core of our charge controller (PMD2) is essentially two switchable mosfet channels: one channel to load a battery (bank) and another channel to divert abundant energy to a dump load. Both channels can be switched on/off by software controlled PWM, and by configuring different PWM duty cycle ratios, we should be able: to […]

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Electrical direct current switching boards

Prototype building block While working on our energy harvester design, we have identified a couple of relatively independent building blocks that could also be interesting for other people doing projects and building prototypes. One building block is the switch: In its most basic form, it closes an electrical circuit after which a load can get […]

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MOSFETS

In this article we are going to give a short overview of mosfets and more specifically power mosfets. Surfing the web, we found this great YouTube video (Developed under Teaching Innovation Project 10-170 of Universidad de Granada in Spain) covering the basics of mosfets: Definition “The metal–oxide–semiconductor field-effect transistor (MOSFET, MOS-FET, or MOS FET) is […]

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