On guard with new Sentinel electrical safety testers from Clare

Significant time and cost saving benefits are provided by the new Sentinel series of bench-top Hipot/flash testers from Clare, which deliver improved type testing during product development or enhanced compliance testing in a laboratory environment.

The Sentinel 200, 500 and 501 electrical safety testers enable manufacturers to check their products in-house to ensure compliance with the relevant international technical conformance standards such as EN 60598, UL 1598, IEC and CSA C22.2 before being sent to third party test/approval houses. This can reduce product time-to-market, saving time and costs in the process.

The Sentinel series is ideal for R&D facilities and compliance laboratories, while design, quality assurance, and manufacturing and production engineers will also benefit from the easy-to-use safety test features.

The fast, safe and accurate testing of high voltages up to 5kV AC and 6kV DC is provided across the range while accurate testing up to 500 VA AC power output - allowing for 100mA tripping currents, a requirement in many standards - is available on the Sentinel 500 and 501 units. The latter also provides earth bond/insulation resistance testing.

Adjustable ramp and hold times (0.1 – 999.9s) allow the test time to be set to rise appropriately to the correct output voltage for compliance with test standards and to reduce the risk of damage to the equipment under test.

Precise measurement outputs are achieved using highly accurate measurement characteristics such as a 2V resolution on output voltage, while 1µA ± (1.5% +30µA) resolution for the trip current ensures accurate measurement of the smallest of leakage currents.

The Sentinel series offers fully automatic testing and remote control, enabling up to 100 test conditions to be saved and recalled for single test purposes. For sequential testing requirements, manual test settings can be linked together to create up to 100 automatic test sequences, enabling simple recall for repeat testing.

Further advanced features include an integrated sweep function which plots measured values, current or resistance values against the test time - represented as a trace graph - enabling changes in the measured values to be recorded throughout the test period rather than as a single value at the end

A remote start terminal and signal I/O port allows for remote starting, safety interlocking and PLC control while an enhanced safety feature will automatically cut off the output voltage within 150µs where normal output voltages are detected or when the upper or lower current trip limits are reached while the device is under test.