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Mid-Project Report: SiCtech

SiCtech Induction participated in the first stage of the Effitorch project designing, developing, manufacturing and validating the Induction Heating power supply, the heating head, which includes the resonant tank, and the inductor with the information and guidelines suggested by Tekniker.

SiCtech Induction participated in the first stage of the Effitorch project designing, developing, manufacturing and validating the Induction Heating power supply, the heating head, which includes the resonant tank, and the inductor with the information and guidelines suggested by Tekniker.

 

First step was to design the specification for the induction heating equipment, the frequency and the power required for the plasma based on its physical behavior (inductance, …), and then the inductor geometry and the magnetic field lines in order to improve the efficiency of the system.

 

With the specifications of power and frequency, and with the inductor defined, the inductance-capacitance series resonant tank was designed accordingly to get the capacitor value required for the application. Then, the obtained capacitance was translated into a real part number capacitors available in the market and with a schematic which can be implemented in the minimum size. This task requires a huge study of different configurations and physical connections in order to minimize the losses in the copper.

Once achieve the resonant tank, the next task was to make all the design documentation of the induction heating equipment for manufacturing, and of course, manufacturing all the equipment.

 

Then, the validation stage plays a very important role. Sictech Induction needed to prepare the validation setup in order to check that the manufactured equipment pass all the specifications. For that task, some DC power supplies and work pieces was prepared in order to run the validation process in SiCtech Induction.

 

Once the equipment was validated, then we managed the transportation to Tekniker, where the validation continued in a laboratory room firstly, and with some prototypes of dummy materials and prototypes where the induction heating equipment was again validated.

 

The last validation was also in Tekniker during this mid-project. In this case, the induction heating was finally integrated in the complete machine for plasma generation, and the last trials were developed.

 

This last validation has not the expected results, and SiCtech Induction developed and manufactured a second version of the inductor. Of course, the heating head was also modified in order to respect the specifications.