Power load bench for electronics department

### DESCRIPTION

Hi, my classmate and I we both are electronics engineering students in the *faculty of exact physical and natural sciences (FCEFyN)* from the *National University of Cordoba (UNC)* working on our final project.

The project itself is an power load bench we designed for our faculty Electronics Department. It is designed to dissipate around 7kW of power, being it AC or DC, whose  main goal is to act as a generator load (to use as a break/load for motors) or to be plugged directly into the power wall and allow the students to measure mono or three phase electric systems, balanced or unbalanced.

### TECHNICAL DETAILS

This bench consists of three branches (thus the ability to be used in three phase systems) of identical electrical characteristics that can be controlled individually.

Each branch consists of a series of handmade passive power resistors that can be shorted to change the total resistance of the branch without the need to turn off the bench. This is done shorting certain resistors to get the desired value.

Schematic for each branch:

Resistors layout:

This control allows the user to select between a range of specified values, thus varying the power dissipated in the bench.

The bench will be connected to a computer program (made by us) allowing the user to monitor the status, currents and voltage in the system live, and also select the value of each branch resistance.

All the control is done made from an ARM Cortex-M3 micro controller, that according to the selected values from the computer program will switch the relays on and off. It's also connected to a current measuring circuit per branch. This way if there's more current that the one the selected resistance can handle it's automatically disconnected.

### Words to PCBWay

We're applying to your program because of another classmate that told us about it. It would be a great honor to enter your sponsorship program, and also would allow us to get our engineering degree, and also leave a good piece of work to the community collage.

Greetings from Cordoba Argentina.