Hipot Testers For Sale
Hipot Test Equipment – AC Hipot Testers
Hipot is an abbreviation for high potential. Traditionally, hipot is a term given to a class of electrical safety testing instruments used to verify electrical insulation in finished appliances, cables or other wired assemblies, printed circuit boards, electric motors, and transformers.
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Under normal conditions, any electrical device will produce a minimal amount of leakage current due to the voltages and internal capacitance present within the product. Yet due to design flaws or other factors, the insulation in a product can break down, resulting in excessive leakage current flow. This failure condition can cause shock or death to anyone that comes into contact with the faulty product.
A hipot test (also called Dielectric Withstanding Voltage (DWV) test) verifies that the insulation of a product or component is sufficient to protect the operator from electrical shock. In a typical hipot test, high voltage is applied between a product’s current-carrying conductors and its metallic shielding. The resulting current that flows through the insulation, known as leakage current, is monitored by the hipot tester. The theory behind the test is that if a deliberate over-application of test voltage does not cause the insulation to break down, the product will be safe to use under normal operating conditions—hence the name, Dielectric Withstanding Voltage test.
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A hipot tester is an electronic device used to verify the electrical insulation in a device or other wired assembly that could subject someone to a shock if it failed. It generally consists of:
- A source of high voltage,
- A current meter,
- A switching matrix used to connect the high voltage source and the current meter to all of the contact points in a cable.
Hipot testers may also have a microcontroller and a display to automate the testing process and display the testing results.
A hipot tester can be very similar to a cable tester and often the two are combined into a single device.
In a typical wired assembly a hipot test should connect all circuits in common to ground. Then, one by one the tester will disconnect a given circuit from ground and connect that circuit to high voltage . The current that flows is monitored to verify that it is low enough.