Ground tester or Hypot with 1/0 welding cable?

I have two devices that left me completely stumped. They are Associated Research made devices. One seems to be a high voltage hypot tester. Another has 1/0 welding cable attached to it. At least one is called HyJoule.

Anyway, I am lost as to just what could be tested with a 1/0 welding cable (about 100 ft or so).

They are both the size of a under the desk refrigerator and VERY heavy, maybe 200-300 lbs each.

i
Reply to
Ignoramus30170
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sell it on ebay as audiophool speaker cable

martin

Reply to
martin griffith

Reply to
M Berger

actually... welding cable is the easiest thing to sell on ebay...

i
Reply to
Ignoramus30170

But what about the welding cable. Why would it be needed. yes, the 30 kV machine is for insulation, but what abonut the one with welding cable attached.

i

Reply to
Ignoramus30170

HyPot tester tests insulation resistance/breakdown, the joule-o-matic tester passes a high current through a safety device to make sure it actually passes the current properly.

Think like testing a surge protecter. The current (actually energy, therefore joules) rating on reg. surge protected outlet strips are pretty good.

lots of stuff has to pass hi-pot testing before it goes out the door, I've never seen something that had to have the currrent test.

Dave

Dave

Reply to
spamTHISbrp

Think HV switch gear, like a substation. My dad helped build an electric foundry, they had to do extensive tests on all the incoming hookups. Big switch gear takes big test equipment.

Stan

Reply to
stans4

Stan, good idea. I think that I understand now, the device with the welding cable is a device for testing circuit breakers.

i
Reply to
Ignoramus30170

It is one of those "major government laboratory" surplus mystery items. I thought I was bidding on one 30 lbs thing, but got two 300 lbs things when I came in.

i
Reply to
Ignoramus30170

That was wrong. after some research and thinking, here's what I think.

  1. The high voltage device is both a hipot tester (delivering a little bit of high voltage to test withstand voltages on insulation), as well as a "thumper". A "thumper" is a machine with big high voltage capacitors that delivers a pulse of high voltage energy to whatever. A similar (but bigger) machine can be seen here:

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  1. The low voltage device with 1/0 welding cable is a ground bond tester that tests ground bond by exposing it to a huge current.

  1. The thumper can possibly be used to compress beer cans and make mini lightnings.

I will post an update if I find the above to be wrong.

i
Reply to
Ignoramus30170

Just wait until one of your surprise purchases turns out to be a unit that test military aircraft for EMP survivability!

Paul

Ignoramus30170 wrote:

Reply to
pdrahn

Well, if the thumper is what I think it is, it could be used to generate modest level EMPs.

i

Reply to
Ignoramus30170

You can find the location of a short in one of those realy big power cables by laying it out and covering it with sand then thumping it with a lot of current, the current cuases the cable to jump and throw the sand up, where the sand stops being thrown up is the location of the fualt.

Colin =^.^=

Reply to
colin

Ott to make a good spot welder...

Reply to
kbeitz

Maybe you have seen it; a 200 kAmp lightning strike simulator is part of the final checkout on big aircraft designs, I'm told.

Reply to
whit3rd

HyJoule is high energy - thus needing the welding cable. Likely dumps large caps down the cables to test switches and relays... Special test requirements.

HyPot is high voltage and tests insulation of wire. Might be 20KV or more - likely 200K.

Martin

Martin H. Eastburn @ home at Lions' Lair with our computer lionslair at consolidated dot net TSRA, Life; NRA LOH & Endowment Member, Golden Eagle, Patriot"s Medal. NRA Second Amendment Task Force Charter Founder IHMSA and NRA Metallic Silhouette maker & member.

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Ignoramus30170 wrote:

Reply to
Martin H. Eastburn

Hi Ig,

I've used gear like this on high voltage cable fault location. From your limited description, I can't tell you exactly what you have there, but I can tell you the sort of gear used on high voltage cable faults.

Testing a new or repaired cable needs high voltage DC , not much current required, typically milliamps once the cable is charged.

When you are trying to locate a fault, you need some way to get a primary location. This can be an impulse current reflection measuring device which shows you a picture of the wave as a hv capacitor is dicharged into the fault. Typically, you do this down a good core, then to the faulty core and compare to see where the waves deviate.

An older method involved a high voltage bridge, and sometimes this required a very heavy cable to connect the far end of a good core to the far end of the faulty core. We have a cable that is like what you describe for a particlarly strange setup in one of our substations.

Once you have a primary location, you go to that point on the cable and listen for the fault with senstive listening equipment while the the capacitor is discharged repeatedly into the fault.

When the cable is buried under a city street, it can be quite difficult to hear the fault. It can also happen that the original fault was cleared so quickly that the outer sheath of the cable is still intact. This means that the noise is inside a lead pipe, and even if you can hear it, you can't pinpoint the exact position of the fault. The answer is to discharge a very large capacitor - high joule - into the cable, the resulting high energy burns the cable down and makes the fault easier to find. I think the second box you have is a burn down unit.

Both these units you have will kill you as quick as look at you. Even if they have not been used in a while, if the capacitors were not dicharged and earthed properly, they will bite. Be careful !

regards,

John

Reply to
Johnno

I took half of it off my truck last night. (it comes in two pieces).

It has about 200 feet of 1/0 welding cable. One 100 ft piece and more smaller pieces, with weird connectors. The use of this cable is to securely ground this set, as it is apparently unsafe when not grounded.

One cabinet is the high voltage power supply, going up to 20 kV DC. It has a twistlock 120V plug, I am not sure what is the amp rating on this machine.

The other cabinet (still in my truck) is the THUMPER unit, that is, a big capacitor and means to discharge it into the object being tested.

There is at least one HV cable that goes from thumper to power supply (to charge the caps in thumper). and a long HV cable that, I think, connects to the cable being tested for faults.

Associated research no longer supports this unit, has no manuals and no old people to remember anything about it. Another victim of corporate buyouts, outsourcings, downsizings etc.

I will try to find out what is the power rating.

I will try to test it the following way:

- ground the unit securely to my house grounding rod

- run it off the generator to prevent interference with the house electrical system

- Connect leads of THUMPER to some thin wire, like 18 gauge wire, so that it would safely explode when THUMPED.

i
Reply to
Ignoramus30897

Makes sense.

Thanks John... I will definitely try to be careful...

i
Reply to
Ignoramus30897

I cannot conceive of why the hipot tester would need anything bigger than say 12 gauge cable. The unit should limit current to the milliampere range.

I've never heard of a Hyjoule but now you have me curious.

Now I'm confused again. My hipot tester isn't light, but is nowhere near that big. It's about

30 lbs in a 4U rackmount.

You might have some heavy duty mil-spec or utility company stuff I've never heard of. Probably not much demand for it on the civilian market.

Reply to
Jim Stewart

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