Requirement
Several electrical incidents appeared on the power supply of photosynthesis lamps on customer’s site. These incidents are described as a dielectric breakdown voltage in transformers and start inductor of lamps during electric priming.
At this stage, several assumptions related to electrical transients are issued such as overvoltage on switch, voltage priming, resonance, ferroresonance.
The customer is required to find a solution with an off-site investigation to identify the problem and fix it. Indeed, due to the element disposition or exposed risks, it could be very difficult to find the source incidents directly on site.
Realization
CAPSIM investigates these assumptions by establishing a digital model to represent the electromagnetic transients.
After the model has been validated on normal operation cases, it allows confirming or disproving the hypothesis of causes related to incidents. In particular, it allows to figure out the maximum overvoltage in different configurations and to analyze the sensitivity of parameters considering the known tolerances.
Once the most probable cause is identified, the model allows investigating possible solutions such as: snubber circuit surges, lightning, design modification…
This model is finally capitalized and may be used thereafter to study any other event or proposal.
Results
From the problem ensured by the customer on his site and the different assumptions proposed, CAPSIM was able to identify the very likely reason of the issue. Thanks to the numeric modelling of the electromagnetic transients, CAPSIM has confirmed one of the suggested solutions.
