Adding a 24V safety relay for the heaters, any thoughts?
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I would like to add additional safety to my printer, mostly protecting against bed or nozzle heater mosfets getting short permanently. The printer uses 24/500W PSU, 40W nozzle heater and 350W bed heater.
My thinking is to add this 24V relay to the 24V high side of the two heaters such that it's connected as long as the duet things everything is ok, and when things go wrong, the duet will assert a not-OK but will still get power and stay alive.
https://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/panasonic-electric-works/HE1AN-S-DC24V/255-1654-ND/570791
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Is this a reasonable approach?
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What OK signals is available from the duet? (I can add a small electronic circuit driving a 24V relay from a 3.3V or 5v signal?
https://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/panasonic-electric-works/HE1AN-S-DC24V/255-1654-ND/570791
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@zapta said in Adding a 24V safety relay for the heaters, any thoughts?:
mostly protecting against bed or nozzle heater mosfets getting short permanently
an appropriately sized fuse for each heater might be better; you could always add some feedback to pause the duet in the event of a fault. afaik there isn't a "OK" signal from the Duet, ref the chargepump thread.
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@bearer, the fuses will not cut if the mosfet shorts and the heaters are on permanently?
As for the OK signal, doesn't the duet has a power supply control output that is supposed to turn off the power-supply if it detects and error? E.g. some regularity in a heater PID loop?
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- No.
- None at all.
The problem is that the Duet can fail. It has many safety measures such as a watchdog, it even tries to detect thermal anomalies… But in case of a failure, you can’t rely any more on the defective system as a whole. So, @bearer is right: apply thermal fuses to your heaters.
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@zapta d'oh, yeah, missed the mofset part at 0630. nope a fuse will not catch that.
the ps_on output might do what you want, never tried it.
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I would suggest that if you figure out a way to activate it despite bearer's comments, that you not go with a standard relay but with an SSR. Relays need drivers and protection diodes, SSR's can be run directly with no protective diodes. You will need to verify that the SSR can be triggered down to 3.3V if that is the available signal.
I have my heat bed (1200W 110V AC operation) protected by an inline thermal fuse. If it gets too hot the fuse blows shutting down the bed.
With RRF3 ver 3.01, there might be a way to generate a safety signal somehow but it is an unbaked idea and I am not sure how well it would work.
There might be a way to hook into the 'heater fault' signal somehow so that if a heater fault occurres, the 24V heater supply voltage is cut off. Again, this is a half baked idea and I don't know if it is feasible or not.
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apply thermal fuses to your heaters.
That's part of my plan, to have the relay coil going through a bed thermal fuse. This way I can use a standard thermal fuse and don't need to worry about the 16A of the bed.
The problem is that the Duet can fail.
Yes, I know, but my goal is to add protection against mosfet short. "Perfect is the enemy of good".
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Maybe M143 might be useful although I have no idea how you would test for the heater fault so that you can shut off power to the heaters.You probably need to run RRF3.01 and it's conditional code to react to a heater fault.
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@zapta said in Adding a 24V safety relay for the heaters, any thoughts?:
have the relay coil going through a bed thermal fuse.
consider adding second NO fuse as a crowbar in case the relay fails.
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@bearer, I see. I will need to find a high current thermal fuse for the bed.
For the E3d V6 nozzle heater what I would really like to find is a heater cartridge with a built in thermal fuse (e.g. 300c). I am surprised I couldn't find any, they would be very popular drop in replacements.
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Do not use SSRs as safety devices.
Go read Omrons data sheets - who supply to industry - and they will say the same thing. ...or at least they did last time I checked.
By using an SSR You are effectively trying to protect against damaging effects from a failure in a MOSFET controlled heater, with another MOSFET. Both of which are vulnerable to transient voltages which can come from various sources such as a dodgy microwave oven, lightining strike within a mile, static discharge, failing power supply, spike on the mains. It is highly likely that the event that gooses your Duet MOSFET will also kill the SSR. Net result being no improvement in safety.
Mechanical relays are more tollerant to brief spikes and noise issues, but don't like switching under load on a regular basis as it wears the contacts out. So mechanical relay linked to PS_ON can be thought of as your enabler, and the SSR/MOSFET as your down stream modulator.
Make sure your system needs to fail in at least two places (that are unlikely to be caused by the same event) before a dangerous situation can occur. So the Duet signalling the PS_ON relay on detection of fault is good and could detect a fault before a thermal fuse tripped. A thermal fuse in series with the heater is hard to beat but not always practical or reliable as maybe the case for the hotend, especially on a highly dynamic machine that uses a wide range of materials.
Regards where the relay sits depends a little on your compitance with mains. Where possible I'd put the relay on the AC side of the PSU, but that necessesitates for multiple PSUs to cover fans/duet and heaters. Being realistic a false trip is more likely than a real one and if it caused a blocked hotend it would be very frustrating.
Be warey of the default Duet setting for when the PS_ON is triggered. Last time I looked it did not offer protection while the system was idle. This has been a feature request for a long time. Likewise I think some timers defaulted to a default fault time before PS_ON is triggered that maybe longer than you are comfortable with.
Edit: AC side because AC is far kinder to relays than DC, but if needed you can get relays that will work on DC side. Make sure you have current fuses in place to blow comfortably before the load/current spec of the relay is exceeded.
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http://www.ia.omron.com/product/cautions/18/safety_precautions.html
"OMRON constantly strives to improve quality and reliability. SSRs, however, use semiconductors, and semiconductors may commonly malfunction or fail. Short-circuit failures represent the main failure mode and can result in an inability to shut OFF the load. Therefore, for fail-safe operation of control circuits that use SSRs, do not use circuits that shut OFF the load power supply only with an SSR, but rather also use circuits with a contactor or breaker that shuts off the load when the SSR fails. In particular, it may not be possible to ensure safety if the SSRs are used outside the rated ranges. Therefore, always use the SSRs within the ratings."
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@zapta said in Adding a 24V safety relay for the heaters, any thoughts?:
I will need to find a high current thermal fuse for the bed.
Depending om the characteristics of the upstream fuse you might not need a lot of current capacity for the crowbar, as long as a potentially short lived dead short will trip it; alternatively you could use a fet/triac/scr or a relay to beef up the ampacity of the crowbar circuit.
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@bearer I like the idea of the crowbar circuits and have thought of using them before. I need to read up a little more. You could always use one of the fan switches to drive the gate on a very chucky mosfet for that purpose.
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@zapta said in Adding a 24V safety relay for the heaters, any thoughts?:
… but my goal is to add protection against mosfet short.
What is the effect of a shorted mosfet? It’s like a PWM of 100% - which is just perfect to drive a heater to higher temperatures. Well, the firmware controls the mosfet and, due to the tuning procedure, „knows“ what readings it should get from the associated thermistor. If these readings don’t match the expectations, the firmware throws an error and switches the mosfet off. If the chip happens to be dysfunctional, you are out of luck: the mosfet has no backup device on board.
The sub-system has multiple components, for instance, it relies on the thermistor to work. I, at least, won’t bet my life on this. With the mosfet, high currents are involved: what damage can be induced to other components of the board? That’s why I state that you can’t rely on the system any more if a single error is detected - it can proliferate.
As a safeguard, we need a second, independent system which will not be affected by a potential failure of the controller or parts thereof. Sure, a thermal fuse won’t protect your mosfet, but it helps to prevent a thermal disaster - even in case that the mosfet survives, but the thermistor fails instead.
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@DocTrucker said in Adding a 24V safety relay for the heaters, any thoughts?:
You could always use one of the fan switches to drive the gate on a very chucky mosfet for that purpose.
sure, but you're still depending on logic then. if you use a thermal fuse, rated a little higher than the previous failsafe to drive a gate or similar you've got an autonomous solution.
(edit: but to simplify this I switched to a mains powered heater and as such the readily available 10A thermal fuses are sufficient to directly cut the power if needed)
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I do love this subject. It is one of those areas where a great design is never noticed, but a bad design is, especially so if it is intrusive to the user.
The down side of this subject is that it can very easily become very shouty and argumentative. For the sake of all of us making our machines better when reading this thread assume no comments are personal digs!
It can often be hard to share differing opinions without upsetting people.
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It can often be hard to share differing opinions without upsetting people.
hope I didn't do that. Finally, it's a good thing to push safety of our devices further, and I surely appreciate that @zapta shares his thoughts with us.
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@bearer an oddity being switching to mains voltage to make something safer, but yes in that case it makes sense.
I have a little less confidence in thermal fuses than current fuses and thermal switches that can be tested. With a resetting thermal switch I can test its trigger point. Once triggered the inline fuse and PSU can detect the short. With a thermal fuse I am relying on the manufacturer's spec sheet. That said it is probably just a case of studying the specified tollerances better.
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@infiniteloop no you didn't no one has so far as I can see. It was mainly to cover my posts as I seem to have a habbit of winding people up when I don't mean to do so on forums!
Edit: especially when discussing safety stuff.