Eye Current

Power Supplies Replace Refurbish or Repair

Power supplies are a large part of what we do at PCO. Typically in much equipment the power supply is the most likely source of failure. Many times there is a decision to be made, repair or replace with new. Usually repair is the cheapest can be the fastest turn around. Repair consist of finding the bad components and often replacing all the electrolytic capacitors. Electrolytics have a bad habit of drying out in old equipment.

A decision could be sometimes be made to replace the supply especially with a newer model. This makes a lot of sense when a continued long life is expected. Designing and supplying newer supplies should give more reliability, lower energy costs, better performance.

Usually power supply design has more to it than one would initially expect. PSMA has a couple of well thought out articles about gotchas and caveats.

The first refers to concerns about about DC to DC converters, the PDF file addresses telecommunications type power where the primary power available is typically -48 Volts. DCS power systems relate to similar issues and trade-offs. Modern designs often use intermediate supplies that are converted to the needed voltages.

The other article at the PSMA site that is interesting is the issue of Make or Buy. We at PCO must deal with this issue all the time. What we normally do is use a modular approach. The module approach allows us to to do any custom fitting, do any specialized alarming and load handling and balancing. Yet we still maintain a short design to product time. By using time tested modules that are known to behave within the selected parameters. We can devote our engineering to alarming loadsharing, and packaging. A modular approach can give us the best of 2 worlds when it comes to make or buy decisions

posted by Ray L. @ 9:24 AM