Ultra-high-energy Lithium Nickel Manganese Cobalt (NMC) Oxide battery technology is being credited with helping the Solar Impulse 2 plane complete its trip around the world using only solar power. The Solar Impulse 2 uses four 38.5 kW-hr NMC battery packs with 150 A-hr cells, totaling 154 kW-hr of energy storage. The batteries are made by […]
Editor's Blog
Lithium Nickel Manganese Cobalt Oxide
Video teardown: Inside the Fitbit Charge
We recently took a close look at a Fitbit, made possible after our recent acquisition of a PC-based microscope for examining tiny stampings of part numbers on super-small ICs. Lots of interesting hardware here: The watch uses two accelerometers and two different processors. The one disappointing aspect of the analysis was that we couldn’t really […]
Video: What can happen without a surge protector
Nasty events can befall electronics in the event of a voltage surge on the ac power lines. We got a dramatic demo of the consequences at Eaton Corp.’s Power Systems Experience Center near Pittsburgh, Pa. In this short video, Center manager Dan Carnovale explains how the zinc-oxide metal-oxide varistors used in most surge protectors work […]
Video: Up close and personal with an energy efficiency scam
We took a trip over to Eaton Corp.’s Power Systems Experience Center near Pittsburgh to see a demonstration of a type of gizmo being promoted as able to boost energy efficiency. These devices generally consist of little more than a capacitor mounted across the ac line. They do impact the power factor of inductive […]
Don’t confuse invention, improvement and innovation
Guest blog by Karim Wassef, general manager — Embedded Systems, GE Critical Power business How often have you read a corporate website or mission statement that says something like, “Our inventions create innovative solutions that improve lives.” My guess is you’ve never heard that from a successful company. Knowing the difference between “invention,” “improvement” and […]
Teardown video: Inside a transformerless solar inverter
We recently had a chance to look inside a transformerless solar inverter from Fronius. The video gives an overview of what we found. Among the more interesting bits were how Fronius seemed to handle Arc fault interruption, MPPT, and metering. Also noteworthy is how much lighter a transformerless design can be than something with a […]
Who are EEs likely to marry? A chart shows the proabilities
Back in the dark ages when I was in engineering school, there was a common perception that engineers were mostly likely to marry nurses. Thanks to work by a couple of Bloomberg Business writers, we can now test that assertion. They scanned data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2014 American Community Survey — which covers […]
Now there’s a UL certification for hoverboards
The testing agency UL, once known as Underwriters Labs, says it will now accept self-balancing scooters, also known as hoverboards, as candidates for a new certification called UL 2272. The new standard specifically covers the hoverboard electric drive train including the rechargeable battery and charger system combination for use in self-balancing scooters. UL says the […]
Your next circuit design could be fabricated on a printer
by Leland Teschler, Executive Editor Manufacturers are making 3D-printed electronics a reality even for designs involving sophisticated multi-layer circuit boards. The sun is starting to set on the days of cobbling together prototype circuits with wires and perfboards. Increasingly, new ideas for electronics will take shape on substrates fabricated by desktop machines taking cues from […]
The next generation of power electronics engineers
by Leland Teschler, Executive Editor, @DW_LeeTeschler Who do you suppose can ace a ten-question quiz about using power transistors? We asked ourselves that question recently when we ran an informal contest on our powerelectronictips.com site. We know the answer in at least one case: The first person with a perfect score was Xiucheng Huang, currently […]
