Power interruption tester for restart circuit

Electronic Design
Contributing Author

Contributing Author
Fri, 1998-05-01 (All day)

Compressors are susceptible to brief power interruptions as short as 30 ms or 2 cycles of ac

power. Even these short glitches may cause a pump to stall when its under load. To
alleviate this potential hazard, a restart circuit was designed. It controls a valve that opens
momentarily to relieve the load after the power interruption. The powerinterruption tester
presented here was designed to test the operation of the restart circuit. It also has been
used to characterize pumps and determine which ones require a restart circuit.
The power interruption circuit uses a 555 timer to create the variable width pulse that
momentarily turns off a triac. The triac functions as an electronic switch supplying ac power
to the pump under test. The circuit is activated by pressing a momentary contact switch.
This supplies a ground to the positive end of C2, which has been charged to +5 V. By setting
the value of C2 to 1 F, the contacts of the switch are debounced and wont retrigger the 555
one shot. The leading edge of the pulse is transferred to the trigger in-put of the one shot.
The 555 timer circuit is configured as the standard one-shot design. C3 is the timing
capacitor and chosen to be 1 F, while R3 is a variable 50k potentiometer. Having it in
series with R5, a 33k resistor, allows the pulse duration to vary from 20 to 50 ms. Changing
these values can easily provide alternative pulse widths and adjustment ranges.
The pulse is coupled to the optoisolator through R4. Resistor R6 assists in wave-shaping the
pulse. The output of the one shot is low until it fires. This condition maintains the isolator
and the triac in the conducting state. When the one shot fires, the output switches to 5 V,
which causes the isolator to remove the drive signal to the output triac. The triac remains
open or off for the duration of the pulse.
The triac chosen for this application is a 2N6071. This part provides plenty of current
capability for the largest motors that were tested. The 800-V breakdown voltage offers
plenty of margin if the tester is to be used on 230-V motors. It was mounted on a heat sink
to assure that the load of larger motors didnt cause the triac to overheat. Using the power
interruption tester makes it convenient to simulate the effect of power-line glitches that can
occur with momentary failures due to storms or maintenance operations.