Hi!

It is a project for which we have not yet decided the best course of action: design ours or try to get something that is being sold by others.

The cleaner is supposed to be up to 20W with transducer running at about 60-70kHz. The subject of the cleaning - optical fiber during processing (after stripping/before splicing).
It is also supposed to have 1) variable power and 2) variable timing.

We have a driving board that some of our earlier engineers developed in the past but those at this point do not allow power variation, nor do I think they are optimally designed. But the worst part, they have custom magnetics (coupling circuit choke and the pulse transformer for the transducer) which we have to wind ourselves as the quantities are not that high.

I have seen some drivers being sold rather cheaply, but I have no experience with them so I do not know if they allow any adjustment or how easy that would be to do it with them.

I could use

1) some advice as to the circuit itself
2) about the vendors who make them
3) maybe pointing me to completed projects of a similar product.
4) advice about power regulation: what we do not know if thin fiber would withstand the PWM regulation as the peak power remains always the maximum, or do we go to varying the output stage's powering voltage while running the CW radiation.

Anything else I missed as I have no experience with cleaning.

Best,

Mike.

 

With a basic search there seems to be literally tons of ultra-sonic driver boards and transducers pouring off the boat from China. Unfortunately most seem to be the 40 KHz flavors. Depending on transducer impedance you could likely find a 60 KHz power amp and drive it with a variable output 60 KHz oscillator stage. If 40 KHz will work for your application and as cheap as the units are I would buy a few Chinese units and look at the possibilities of hacking them. You may also want to look at Application Note 446 A 150W IC Op Amp Simplifies Design of Power Circuits. a Google of "Power amplifier for ultrasonic transducer excitation" should get you some good hits.

Ron

 

Reloadron

Thanks for the suggestion, especially for the appnote.
Forgot to mention: the CCU (Cheap Chinese Units) seem all to be powered by the outlet voltages. I will need one to accept 12V power. Not a big deal but can't quite use the units the way they are, will need to recalculate the pulse xfmr.

 

The cleaner is supposed to be up to 20W with transducer running at about 60-70kHz.

With that in mind 12 Volts * 2 Amps would be 24 Watts so running on 12 Volts you may want to consider a 12 Volt 3 Amp source for power. What you ultimately end up with is a 60 KHz oscillator of variable amplitude driving a 20 watt power amp with an output impedance capable of driving your transducer.

Ron