EMRP-IND60: Improved EMC Test Methods in Industrial Environments

• Forschungsstelle: METAS
• Projektnummer: F-5218.30022
• Projekttitel Englisch: EMRP-IND60: Improved EMC Test Methods in Industrial Environments

Schlüsselwörter (Englisch)

Round robin, EMC testing, onsite testing, common mode, radiated immunity

Kurzbeschreibung (Englisch)

Nowadays, achieving Electromagnetic Compatibility (EMC) compliance for electrical and electronic products is a must before a product can enter the market. EMC measurement and validation are necessary during the whole period of development of products. However, development and maintenance of an EMC measurement facility in accordance with standards is a heavy load for industry. Using facilities in EMC laboratories is a solution but is expensive and time consuming and most of the time it is impossible for large or stationary Equipment Under Test (EUTs) and adapted methodologies and procedures are required for industry in terms of EMC test and measurement applications.
Research on the performance of existing alternative methods and the development of new alternative methods are crucial for the European industry. Techniques to determine the uncertainty of measurements have to be developed to comply with the required reproducibility of measurements. In addition, correlations have to be established between the alternative EMC test methods and standard EMC test methods. Moreover the output of this project will allow the validation of new and more efficient testing methods and to provide evidence of potential cost reductions.
The project firstly aims to investigate and improve the existing alternative methods which are already used in industry, to establish their correlation with corresponding laboratory tests and prepare their uncertainty budgets/calculations. Secondly, this project also aims to develop new alternative EMC test methods to standard EMC tests in accordance with the needs of European industry.

This project is part of the European Metrology Research Programme (EMRP, http://www.euramet.org/index.php?id=emrp); it is partly funded by the European Union on the basis of Decision No 912/2009/EC.

Projektziele (Englisch)

METAS is mainly involved in workpackage 5 of the project.
The aim of this work package is to develop concepts for and the EMC test devices that may be used for inter-laboratory comparisons for both emission and immunity tests. As mentioned in the introduction, it is very important to provide tools for interlaboratory EMC test comparison, thus enabling these laboratories to fulfill the requirements of the EN ISO 17025 standard.
A round robin test (RRT) is widely used in experimental methodology, where a test is performed independently several times either with the use of the same method or a variety of methods and equipment. It is particularly useful in evaluation and verification of the EMC alternative test methods in this JRP and will be used to determine the reproducibility of a test method and also to verify a new analysis method.
Although commercial products exist, there are currently no standard EMC reference devices for round robin testing which are universally accepted. It is important to develop such EMC test devices and this project proposes to consider not all, but the following critical EMC tests:
- Harmonic measurements
- Conducted emission measurements
- Conducted immunity testing.
Each of these tests will be divided into concept work, a realisation task, practical tests and comparisons.

Abstract (Englisch)

Inter-laboratory comparisons are an important method to evaluate the capabilities of EMC test laboratories. A prerequisite is the availability of a suitable test device. In this project, a new device was developed which is able to assess the immunity test capabilities of a laboratory according to the IEC 61000-4-6 standard. The device is intended to be tested as a normal EUT. It is equipped with appropriate detectors that record all important parameters associated with a chosen test set-up. The evaluation of the device performed shows that the device is able to identify a large set of faulty test procedures or mistakes in the setup. The concept and prototype for a conducted immunity reference source were completed and it is ready now for inter-comparison immunity tests.

Umsetzung und Anwendungen (Englisch)

Thanks to comparisons performed among all project partners within this project, the knowledge on immunity testing was increased. The device developed within this project can be used to increase the quality of EMC testing of accredited labs. This project opens a new opportunity for METAS to provide EMC testing in Europe as "Proficiency Testing Provider".

Publikationen / Ergebnisse (Englisch)

1. Emrah Tas et al., A new Conducted Immunity Test Device for Interlaboratory Comparison, 2015 IEEE International Symposium on Electromagnetic Compatibility (EMC), p. 855-860, August 2015.
2. Emrah Tas et al., Proficiency Testing for Conducted Immunity with a new Round Robin Test Device, 2016 IEEE International Symposium on Electro-magnetic Compatibility (EMC).