PWM Fan Cooling System
Posted on Tuesday, March 30th, 2021
| Client | Peter Hempinstall |
| Professor(s) | Mauricio Ledon, |
| Program | Electrical Engineering Technology |
| Students | Carson Morris – Team Lead Daniel Becking |
Project Description:
At Ciena, one of the biggest bottlenecks to the testing phase of a new technology is the initial decision of which wiring configuration is best to ensure proper climate control for proper testing. With some products requiring more cooling than others as well as some products having more surface area to cool, it’s difficult to create one solution that is able to cool all of these different products properly. The current solution for the jig mounted fans is to wire the fans to either full speed (parallel) or half speed (series). Wiring these fans back and forth can be extremely time consuming while also limiting the options of the engineers to two speeds of airflow. The fans are often switched so many times during this decision phase that by the end there is next to no wire left to cut to do the modification.
The solution proposed is to create a control module using Pulse-Width-Modulation to be able to control the fans to go the exact desired speed. In addition to this, an algorithm will be developed to read the temperature from the onboard temperature sensor on the device and change the fan speed base on the current temperature. This device will have two arrays of three fans on each side of the card which can be expanded as well as a temperature sensor input for either side in order to assure all sides receive proper cooling.
Short Description:
The purpose of this project is to create a PWM dual array adaptive fan speed controller capable of cooling prototype boards under test. This system will be able to properly monitor two separate chips on a board under test and individually cool them.
Video Presentation
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