DIY 10kW (30kW Pulse) Electronic Load

An overview of the 10kW continuous and 30kW pulsed electronic load I've been building, and submitted for the Hackaday Prize 2023.
This design uses an array of switched high-power chassis-mount resistors to produce any arbitrary load. This approach provides extreme scalability, low-cost, and high robustness. While simple in principle, the sheer scale and need for high frequency pulses make this a challenging design.
For more information, please see my project log: hackaday.io/pr...
#HackadayPrize

[@maximilianschmieder2527]

Incredible project. I was always wondering why no one uses power resistors in that application. Awesome video!

[@FixedUntilBroken]

How much did it end up costing to build your system? I stumbled on your project, and it reminds me of some of the loads we built at work for in house testing. I work in the power electronics field. Ours used steel grid resistors. BTW, some of the more modern regenerative loads are impressively small. If you are doing a product that has a burn-in test, those loads can really pay for themselves over time, but if you are just doing design verification or such a used load and maybe a rental will be the most cost-effective. Cool project.

[@tinfever]

It cost much more than I would have liked. I just looked them up and regenerative loads are really interesting. Thanks.

[@FixedUntilBroken]

@@tinfever for the large current applications rebling 7020 connectors are really useful. Leviton also makes some oversized banana looking connectors that work nicely. Some of the regenerative loads can be quirky. A lot of them are load/sources and many of them are designed with battery system testing in mind. One example of quirks I've seen is with the Pacific Power load/source. If you are using it in load mode and demand a current higher than the DUT can provide it will start going negative by default. You have programmatically set it not to do that.