We have been presented with an engineering problem that we are not sure how to solve: we need to be able to measure high-frequency ripple current (up to several MHz) on a DC power rail that can be anywhere from zero to 500 volts, and get that in a form that can be fed into a logging device. The DC component of the current can be up to 100 amperes. Any engineers here who can give some advice?
@Felthry Any specific logging device or are you rolling the entire solution?
@zetasyanthis probably going to use an oscilloscope and possibly also a some sort of dSPACE unit or equivalent
but it's been pointed out to us that we're kind of getting ahead of ourselves here and we need to do the basics before worrying about metrology
@Felthry Also re: this, can current transformers not give you high enough bandwidth?
@zetasyanthis our target is 30MHz, and it's going to be on top of a DC bias of 100A--that's going to saturate most cores
@Felthry Ah, I hadn't thought about the saturation issue. Hmm.
@zetasyanthis We considered a Rogowski coil, which is essentially just an air-core current transformer, but, well. Air-core.
@Felthry Hmm. What kind of resolution do you need?
@zetasyanthis Our lab (unfortunately) uses Tektronix scopes mostly (we don't like tektronix as much as agilent (no, keysight is a bad name, I'm calling it agilent)), so let me see if they make one of those...
@Felthry I don't see why tek vs. agilent is an issue there? It just outputs a BNC. And there's a whole series, looks like. https://www.keysight.com/en/pc-1659326/oscilloscope-current-probes?cc=US&lc=eng
@Felthry Also, fyi, most oscilloscopes are 8 bit
@zetasyanthis Yeah, I know--I think we have some really expensive sixteen-bit one somewhere though
but also we're interested in lower frequency stuff, which means you can increase the ENOB somewhat with averaging...or something? signal processing stuff is complicated
