OREANDA-NEWS. Alps Green Devices has developed the “GCBC Series” high-precision current sensor, achieving compact size, light weight and low loss. Samples will be made available from July 2013.

With growing importance attached to energy savings in recent years, efforts to reduce the power consumption of various electronic devices have picked up momentum. In particular, motors are said to account for around 60% of power consumption in Japan, suggesting that lowering the amount of power consumed by motors would have significant energy saving benefits.

As a result, attention is focusing on inverters, which can reduce power consumption through fine control of motor operation and which are expected to have benefits even for equipment that is not motor-driven, for example by helping to create high-efficiency power conditioners. A key device for achieving high-precision inverter control is the current sensor.

Current sensors generally employ one of two approaches—measurement based on shunt resistance, or measurement of the magnetic flux generated around a current. The DC current transformer (DCCT) approach employing flux measurement is widely used to achieve high-precision detection while keeping down costs. The DCCT approach is generally used with magnetic elements that have low sensitivity and therefore a magnetic core is required to concentrate flux around the current. This results in larger and heavier equipment designs. In addition, existing current sensors became hot quickly due to high resistance in the primary conductor, leading to associated power loss.

The GCBC Series supports a maximum continuous current up to ±50A and Alps Green Devices is developing sensors that will detect currents of up to 150A.