Zibb

Senior Technical Editor Martin Rowe covers topics relating to general-purpose instrumentation, compliance, communications test, and anything else that comes along.



   Advertisement

Profile

RSS Feed

  • Add this blog to your RSS newsreader!

Recent Posts

Recent Comments

Most Commented On

Archives

By Category

Blog

Wednesday, August 19, 2009

EMC Symposium: MIL-STD-461F demos

Aug 19 2009 4:55PM | Permalink |Comments (0) |


Today at the EMC Symposium, Steve Ferguson of Washington Labs gave a demonstration on test setups for MIL-STD-461F Method CS116 for conducted susceptibility on cables and power leads. It uses damped sinusoidal transients at frequencies from 10 kHz to 100 MHz. He discussed the test setup and its calibration where he used an HV Technologies pulse generator to inject current into cables.

“There’s no such thing as a shielded power cable,” he noted, “because when you get to the AC mains, there’s no shielding.” In the demo, he injected a damped 100-kHz sine wave with a peak voltage of 260 mV into 50 Ω, which is too much voltage to comply with the test.

Ferguson used an oscilloscope to show the audience the damped waveforms. He also used the oscilloscope with a currnet probe to measure the injected current. He explained that for low-impedance circuits you have to gradually increas the current to find the level that creates susceptibility problems.

To learn more about how MIL-STD-461F differs from previous versions of the standard, see “Military standard gets a revision,” where you can download Ferguson’s paper that covers the standard paragraph-by-paragraph.


Related entries in: EMC Test | Interference | Technical Standards | 


Post a comment



Display Name

Change Image
Before submitting this form, please type the characters displayed above.
Note the letters are NOT case sensitive.


ADVERTISEMENT

©1997-2009 Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Use of this Web site is subject to its Terms of Use | Privacy Policy

Please visit these other Reed Business sites