AC power digital reshaping

Yeah I don't get it. Some of their claims are pure crazy and make no sense as to why you'd ever care. But then you get to the cybersecurity part, and yes that's true. It is completely possible (and has been done for a very long time) to monitor equipment's power signatures historically and currently to see if there is a problem and potential hack. It is also possible to characterize the power use to figure out what bits are flipping and this is used in cryptography cracking.

My guess is this is a DoD project from long ago and now they're trying to spin it as snake oil after their secrecy clause expired to get more sales and extract more money from the research. There is no reason to do this otherwise. That's my guess anyways.

 

if it works, you won't have to ask.

 

Inverters come in two quality levels, modified sine and sine wave. Modified sine is cheaper, but it wastes energy through excess heating. Some electronics wont even work with it. Sound familiar?

So yes, power quality makes a difference. 3DFS seems to have taken the next step beyond pure sine technology. The only question is magnitude, and that is trivial to measure. If the improvement in power utilization is on the order of 20% like they say, it will be like a 20% reduction in the cost of power.

 

20-percent minus the cost of implementing 3DFS.

Given the number of zeroes involved...if it makes the grid more robust and results in even a 5-percent gain in efficiency from plant to plug - then the bigs will be clamoring alllll over themselves to implement it...

 

GACK! What a terrible write-up for a simple concept.

Let's start with power factor: Power factor - Wikipedia

AC electricity flows as a combination of voltage and current. Into an ideal, resistive load, the current at any instance of time follows exactly the voltage. But in the real world, the current does not follow the voltage. For example, a traditional power supply that uses a bridge rectifier into a capacitor:


The current only flows during a small part of the voltage cycle because the capacitor voltage is often higher than the AC voltage. You can't stuff 80V current into a capacitor having more than 80V. In effect the peak voltage of an AC signal sees a big current draw and as soon as the AC cycle falls below the capacitor voltage, the current flow stops. To handle these current bursts, the AC power wire is heated during the current flow and then cools during the now flow periods.

The clever power supply engineer feeds to rectified AC to a buck-boost, switching power supply that keeps the feed current in sync with the voltage:

But this is typically done by individual loads. What is needed is a general purpose, power factor correcting circuit that interfaces the AC grid to the local loads.

So replace the "To DC-DC Converter" with an inverter that generates a 60Hz power signal to the load. Locally, the building power lines still suffer the crappy mismatch between voltage and current BUT the grid sees a building with what looks like a perfect, resistive load. Since this is done on a 60Hz cycle (actually 120Hz due to bridge rectification), the utility side where the meter is located actually runs a little slower, saving billable kWh.

Of course this is pure speculation about what the heck they are doing but it is my best guess.

Bob Wilson

 

Yes the PFC is built into pretty much everything that matters already. It has been a requirement for most designs for a long time. They're trying to move it infront of everything, but really what does that gain you? Little stuff. It adds up, but it would require every house to have one

 

Power factor correction at the service point is about the only way to come up with anything that matches the claims. The box could distort the voltage waveform to match the current draw and that should work. At least that is how I’d approach it.

Bob Wilson

 

Mine is still not quieting down.

 

Back to the mod-sine versus pure sine inverters. The reason you want to avoid mod-sine is that it introduces noise and unnecessary heating to the load. Pure sine simply works better. The question is magnitude and price. We'll have to see real products to figure out if it's worth the effort.