QDev Technical Seminar: Ruben Grigoryan

Equipment Grounding. Part I Safety Issues

We are all working with electrical equipment that are usually powered from 220V AC lines which is enough high to severely injure a human and to destroy an expensive piece of equipment. In most of the equipment, the conductive enclosure is connected via the power cord to the grounding pin in a power outlet. In this case, if there is a grounding fault, a circuit breaker will safely disconnect the corresponding outlet from the AC line thus preventing any further damage. However, we sometimes intentionally or unintentionally disconnect enclosures of electrical equipment in our experimental setups. The main aim of this presentation is to brush up on equipment grounding and to insure that everyone is safe while running the experiments.