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- Jun 15, 2018
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This thread contains instructions and drawings to create an induction heater.
The internet is bloated with diverse projects for induction heater but unfortunately only a few of them have any chances to become an useful tool and most of them will fry out in a matter of days or even seconds With this design I harness my very long experience on electronics and try to cope with the machining. Yes, this project involves quite some interesting machining including (but not limited to) piping fittings for the heater coil and radiator, water cooled heatsinks for rectifier, FET array and controller power electronics.
At the business end of the induction heater there is a ZVS driver. I chose a chinese 1800W driver which I will modify to be able to fully deliver the power to the output coil. At the moment the coil connections are flimsy and the supplied coil is a joke. However, one cannot buy the separate components with the price of this unit. Cheap Chinese units are available on all common auction sites.
The coolant will be circulated with a pump. When choosing a pump for a project like this one should look for a device with an adequate yield. A centrifugal pump is generally adequate but those must be placed under water level as they have no suction. I chose a ROTEK 24V WPCD 11.5l/min@0.3 bar device. Although this pump is submersible it will be running outside the water reservoir.
The generated heat must be dissipated out of the cabin. For this task I chose a 115 x 210 mm Mocal oil cooler with BSP fitting. Thank god those fittings are not tapered. It will still be a challenge for me to machine those fittings. Luckily those must be made of aluminium.
The coolant flow and temperature must be monitored. For flow monitorin a flow meter is used. This is a device (YF-S402) that sends pulses when the fluid is flowing. For temperature monitoring two Philips KTY-sensors are used. One for coolant and another for cabin ambient temperature. Those are very cheap and more than accurate enough for the task. In the picture I have disassembled the flow sensor. This unit should not be placed on the pressure side of the coolant flow. Best place is right before or after the radiator.
The blower (fan) will be one or more PWM controlled PC cabin blowers. For this project I chose a super-silent blower that has the PWM control and RPM monitoring facilities. Most of the blowers (4-pin PWM connector) have these features inbuilt.
All this needs a controller. I have designed one and the schematics, etching masks, gerber files for PCB manufacturers and whatnot are included in the attached eagle.zip. With these files it is possible either manufacture the PCB home or let some PCB prototype-manufacturer take care of that. The chosen components are widely available either directly or be easily replaced.
The controller needs a program. The microcontroller is a cheap Atmel AtMega32L which has just enough I/O for this task. I will attach the program (written with avr-gcc) once I get it debugged.
There will also be an User Manual in English, German, Swedish and Finnish languages.
In case You want to see all files involved with this project these are available at Hobby-Machinist Directory in my server.
The internet is bloated with diverse projects for induction heater but unfortunately only a few of them have any chances to become an useful tool and most of them will fry out in a matter of days or even seconds With this design I harness my very long experience on electronics and try to cope with the machining. Yes, this project involves quite some interesting machining including (but not limited to) piping fittings for the heater coil and radiator, water cooled heatsinks for rectifier, FET array and controller power electronics.
At the business end of the induction heater there is a ZVS driver. I chose a chinese 1800W driver which I will modify to be able to fully deliver the power to the output coil. At the moment the coil connections are flimsy and the supplied coil is a joke. However, one cannot buy the separate components with the price of this unit. Cheap Chinese units are available on all common auction sites.
The coolant will be circulated with a pump. When choosing a pump for a project like this one should look for a device with an adequate yield. A centrifugal pump is generally adequate but those must be placed under water level as they have no suction. I chose a ROTEK 24V WPCD 11.5l/min@0.3 bar device. Although this pump is submersible it will be running outside the water reservoir.
The generated heat must be dissipated out of the cabin. For this task I chose a 115 x 210 mm Mocal oil cooler with BSP fitting. Thank god those fittings are not tapered. It will still be a challenge for me to machine those fittings. Luckily those must be made of aluminium.
The coolant flow and temperature must be monitored. For flow monitorin a flow meter is used. This is a device (YF-S402) that sends pulses when the fluid is flowing. For temperature monitoring two Philips KTY-sensors are used. One for coolant and another for cabin ambient temperature. Those are very cheap and more than accurate enough for the task. In the picture I have disassembled the flow sensor. This unit should not be placed on the pressure side of the coolant flow. Best place is right before or after the radiator.
The blower (fan) will be one or more PWM controlled PC cabin blowers. For this project I chose a super-silent blower that has the PWM control and RPM monitoring facilities. Most of the blowers (4-pin PWM connector) have these features inbuilt.
All this needs a controller. I have designed one and the schematics, etching masks, gerber files for PCB manufacturers and whatnot are included in the attached eagle.zip. With these files it is possible either manufacture the PCB home or let some PCB prototype-manufacturer take care of that. The chosen components are widely available either directly or be easily replaced.
The controller needs a program. The microcontroller is a cheap Atmel AtMega32L which has just enough I/O for this task. I will attach the program (written with avr-gcc) once I get it debugged.
There will also be an User Manual in English, German, Swedish and Finnish languages.
In case You want to see all files involved with this project these are available at Hobby-Machinist Directory in my server.
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