Prof. Montanari and his team have been awarded with the ARPA-E project "High Power Density Motor Equipped with Additively Manufactured Windings Integrated with Advanced Cooling and Modular Integrated Power Electronics", which is coordinated by Marquette University and where at CAPS take care of the insulation system design, testing and, in the second phase, possibly monitoring.
To this purpose, but also for other projects including in particular our Consortium, we started already time ago to develop manufacturing and procurement of tools which are fundamental for our research activity. The hits here are that Roger Mc Ginnis was able to obtain funding to purchase a unique lab asset, that is, a chamber endowed with variable pressure, humidity, broad range of temperature and high voltage up to 50 kV. Peter Cheetam and Sastry Pamidi, belonging to our CAPS COMET team, are working on it. We hope to have it installed in 4 to 6 months, depending on COVID and other stuff, in the new CAPS lab building.
We started to develop (with the help of Michael Steuer team...and his funding...) a new testing generator, made of a PWM inverter having number of levels and slew rate that can be modified, and voltage up to +- 10 kV. This does not exist anywhere in the market, and we have targeted 6 months to have the first prototype. As you can imagine, this can be, combined with the chamber, a test assembly that is unique in US. To make it even more unique, we are waiting for the delivery of the first prototype of a brand new PD detector that we developed with the support of Dr. Riddhi Ghosh (who joined us already at CAPS, thanks to a donation from Prysmian, and will be a pillar of the Consortium). It can measure PD with any type of waveform (from DC to power electronics), reject noise, identify PD, evaluate component health...automatically and without the need of experts. We will test extensively such innovative instrument in CAPS in the next months, in the contest of the activity we are underlining here. It will be of course available to interested participants.
