4 ms·
"Ibrahima Ndiaye, a senior principal engineer at GEVAR who led the project, says the breakthrough was figuring out how to give a conventional transformer the ca
by Hilift 2y ago
"Ibrahima Ndiaye, a senior principal engineer at GEVAR who led the project, says the breakthrough was figuring out how to give a conventional transformer the capability to change its impedance (that is, its resistance to electricity flow) without changing any other feature in the transformer, including its voltage ratio.
"Impedance and voltage ratio are both critical features of a transformer that ordinarily must be tailored to each use case. If you can tweak both factors independently, then you can modify the transformer for various uses. But altering the impedance without also changing the transformer’s voltage ratio initially seemed impossible, Ndiaye says.
"The solution turned out to be surprisingly straightforward. The engineer added the same amount of windings to both sides of the transformer’s core, but in opposite directions, cancelling out the voltage increase and thereby allowing him to tweak one factor without automatically changing the other. “There is no [other] transformer in the world that has a capability of that today,” Ndiaye says."
- mycall 2y agoIt is hard to believe that no other transformer has used opposite directions in the past. It is such a big oversight.
- svilen_dobrev 2y agoi am not much into transformers, but isn't so-called zero-flux thing something similar? https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/511880/measure-dc-current-with-current-transformer https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/511880/measu...
- magicalhippo 2y agoFrom what I can gather, this[1] is the research paper behind the described transformer, however it's not open access. However there is an available technical report here[2] with details. The design is based on an autotransformer[3], where the primary and secondary windings are connected in series, so effectively one coil. Section 2 in the technical report has details on how the flexible impedance windings. It's not as trivial as just adding some more windings, though perhaps in practice that's what it looks like. [1]: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9959916 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9959916 [2]: https://www.osti.gov/biblio/1527031 https://www.osti.gov/biblio/1527031 [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autotransformer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autotransformer