Circuit protection devices serve two main purposes that are essential to medical equipment, safety and reliability, by disconnecting power in a circuit during overcurrent. Learn the ins and outs of circuit breakers, fuses, and how to best protect equipment from overcurrent in The Designer’s Guide to Preventing Overcurrent in Medical Devices: Ensuring Product Safety for Device and User.
With so many circuit protection device types, design choices, and configurations, making the appropriate selection for your specific medical equipment can feel daunting – especially with staff and patient safety on the line. How to Select the Right Circuit Protection for Your Medical Device will guide you through what you need to know to make the best circuit protection choice for your application.
Specifying the right breaker early in the design process can lead to a more robust design, avoid redesigns, decrease development costs, and add value to the end product. Seems pretty simple, right? But selecting the best circuit breaker for your application is a multi-step process.
Three main factors go into choosing between circuit breakers and fuses: Convenience for the user, cost, and degree of protection. While some of these may seem obvious, they're not, and the answers vary depending on the application. Here are some pointers to help you decide.
It's only a circuit breaker. Yet there is enough complexity and confusion when it comes to specifying circuit protection that many engineers are designing equipment with too little or too much protection. Under protected circuits leave equipment vulnerable to damaging electrical surges. Over protected circuits add cost and can lead to nuisance tripping.
Circuit breakers are used in a variety of ways. They are mounted in panelboards to protect branch circuit wiring, and they are built into equipment to protect it. With this range of applications, it's not surprising that a circuit breaker must provide both short circuits and overload protection. This white paper will give pointers on how to determine the main job a breaker must do...
The limit values for carbon dioxide emissions are getting stricter and stricter globally. By 2020 the average emission of new cars will drop to 95 g/km in the European Union. For light commercial vehicles the target value is 147 g/km. For passenger cars this corresponds to a consumption of 4.1 litres petrol or 3.6 litres diesel. These numbers are driving passenger car manufacturers to look for ways to further reduce fuel consumption and in turn carbon dioxide emissions.
A Miniature Circuit Breaker (MCB) is a resettable protective device that prevents electrical circuits from catching fire and causing damage to personnel and property. It is a device designed to isolate a circuit during an overcurrent event without using a fusible element. There are two types of overcurrent events; a thermal overload and a short circuit.
An increase in the demand for energy worldwide has driven the search for alternative primary sources of energy, even to the most remote locations of the globe. Natural gas, one of the leading alternative energy choices for fueling industries today, is considered the cleanest burning fossil fuel with minimal environmental impact.
For most industries, the accepted norm for unplanned downtime is 5% of operating time, which represents a direct, significant loss of revenue and therefore profit. But have you ever stopped to consider the true cost of downtime?
Process automation projects are most often driven by bottom line results, return on investment and an appropriate value position or justification. More and more, systems are expected to: provide access to quantitative measurement points of important processes, detect and correct problems immediately, measure trends, pinpoint and eliminate bottlenecks, control larger and more complex processes within a large geographic area...
It’s not a totally new idea: In order to save space and reduce cost, a three-pole circuit breaker can protect three single phase loads. What if the loads – e.g. electric motors – have different technical data and need different types of protection?