About the DS3800NTCF1B1B
The DS3800NTCF1B1B from GE is a thermocouple condition card for the Mark IV series, which is General Electric’s steam and gas turbine management system. The MKIV is built with triple-redundancies on all critical controls and protection parameters, which act on two-out-of-three voting functions to keep the system running optimally.
The MKIV relies on thirteen thermocouple cards to maintain turbine temperature control. The thermocouples are placed around an exhaust plenum. The thermocouple cards receive the actual exhaust temperature as a temperature control algorithm and computes the difference between that and the exhaust temperature reference set point. This difference becomes a command signal to limit the exhaust temperature. It becomes obvious then why all thermocouple cards must remain in good working order, rather than allow corrupt data lead to poor statistical input that could possibly cause combustor or engine issues.
The DS3800NTCF1B1B has seven test points, two PCB mating connectors (218A4637-P4 8933 and 218A4553-1 A/mp 533002-1 8931,) and extractor clips. These nylon clips help technicians with both the installation of the board and its extraction, especially when space is tight.
The DS3800NTCF1B1B is built with five jumper switches. Jumpers allow for a certain amount of customization of the PCB, as the user can finish off circuits as they choose. The board has a single resistor network and four (rotary) potentiometers. Both resistor network arrays and potentiometers can be used for voltage division.
The DS3800NTCF1B1B is built with eight circuits. This includes octal buffers and line drivers, and hex inverting gates.
GE provided all technical support for the DS3800NTCF1B1B; this includes printed material like manuals.