Monday, July 15, 2013

The Challenge of Reverse Engineering an Obsolete Military Power Transformer" Article by Mike Horgan

Unfortunately the wound
toroidal inductor broke into
several pieces during disassembly.
Read about our challenge
Our Engineering & Quality Manager, Mike Horgan, recently wrote an article on a reverse engineering project we completed.  The article is titled, "Reverse Engineering an Obsolete Military Power Transformer".  This project was challenging since there was incomplete and outdated documentation for us to work from including a lack of detail concerning the current.  Tobyhanna Army Depot worked to find all of the old documentation (possibly 30 years old) to help us custom design and recreate this transformer assembly.  Many necessary details were left out - making this quite the challenge.

Here is an excerpt from the article Mike wrote:

"...Butler winding recently completed a reverse engineering effort for the Tobyhanna Army Depot on what we initially thought was a multi-tapped power transformer in an encapsulated box with connectors. We were given a non-functioning assembly of an EMP Electronics Inc. part (see photo 1) and some system level drawings but nothing specific about the assembly. When we disassembled the unit we realized this was more than just one transformer."   Read more...