10m SAC at Danfoss Drives

As one of the largest suppliers of state-of-the-art AC drives, it is an understatement to say we do a lot of testing at Danfoss Drives. In the past, our EMC engineers had to travel to external testing facilities located hours away to test each revision of a new prototype. A costly and time-consuming business to say the least. It was always the plan, therefore, to install our own semi anechoic EMC test chamber in one of our local test labs. The final decision was to install in Flensburg, Germany.

An opportunity arose when we met with Comtest’s engineers on another project a little while ago. That project fell through, but we did get a chance to discuss many of the matters that would be important when designing a project of our own. Because of the quality of the suggestions and input put forward by Comtest at that time, we felt confident in partnering with them for the construction of our new SAC10 chamber.

Comtest was extremely flexible and forward thinking during the negotiation, planning, and construction phases. They even went so far as to agree to including instrumentation by a supplier not their own, still providing us with a turn-key solution and a single point of contact for the project.  If I were to offer criticism of any kind, it would be that we would have liked some more updates when the late delivery of a turntable threatened to cause a delay. However, since Comtest went above and beyond to secure timely delivery (and, in turn, on schedule completion of the project), we won’t hold that against them.

Danfoss AC Drives are often used in industrial applications, that is why the EUT can get very heavy indeed. That’s another reason why operating our own EMC chamber has proven to be such a huge advantage. Because this chamber was ours to configure, it is set up to provide us with load possibilities, that are far beyond anything that is possible with third party testing solutions. This makes our test execution very close to real life usage of our products.

Everyone on the team here at Danfoss, as well as myself as project owner, is quite pleased with the way Comtest has run this project. We trusted them to deliver a high-performance testing facility in a timely manner and that is exactly what they did.

Tim Flintholm Fink, Director of Test, Validation and Engineering Support at Danfoss Drives.