The board
Internship
Engineering
Intern, Medium Voltage Test Engineering
Heron Power · Engineering
- Where
- Scotts Valley
- Posted
- 4 days ago
What to Expect
Heron Power is a startup company building cutting-edge power electronics for the 21st-century grid. We aim to de-bottleneck the growth of electricity generation and consumption with scalable, innovative, and less costly hardware solutions, accelerating the electrification of everything.
Our first goal is to build better converters (inverters & rectifiers) to connect large-scale renewables, storage, and loads to the grid. Heron’s leadership team is made up of seasoned veterans who have designed and shipped gigawatts of power conversion products over the past decade.
We understand that no one individual knows everything. We will all learn a lot together and from each other. We strive to build a collaborative, enriching environment conducive to personal, technical, and career growth.
What you'd do
- Design, build, and operate medium-voltage test benches: HV power supplies, measurement dividers, partial discharge detection systems, protective earthing schemes, and safety interlocks.
- Own bench system design: HV clearances, grounding architecture, protection strategy, measurement integrity, and safe operating procedures.
- Build and document test fixtures for cable assemblies, busbars, insulation specimens, and HV subcomponents—to a standard someone else can operate safely.
- Learn and strictly enforce MV lab safety protocols: electrical clearances, interlock design, lockout/tagout, and safe approach procedures.
- Execute dielectric strength tests—AC/DC withstand and impulse—against defined acceptance criteria; own data collection and reporting.
- Perform insulation resistance, polarization index, and dielectric loss (tan δ) measurements using HV megohmmeters, LCR bridges, and dielectric analyzers.
- Run partial discharge (PD) measurements end to end: system setup, acquisition, PRPD pattern generation, and first-pass interpretation.
- Execute accelerated aging and environmental stress campaigns on insulating materials under thermal, humidity, and combined stress conditions.
- Track and analyze degradation trends across test campaigns: capacitance drift, tan δ evolution, PD magnitude and repetition rate, breakdown statistics.
- Build structured data workflows and visualizations that clearly show baseline, stressed, and failed states—and make the trajectory actionable.