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PowerLines by Linnea Brush
March 6, 2000
For Those Who Service and Protect
Power Channels: Batteries and Portable Power, Switch-Mode Power, Automotive Electronics, Power Quality Protection, Renewable Energy, Communications Power, Motion Control, Power Components
A few weeks ago, I got an e-mail from a fellow who felt Darnell was neglecting two very important aspects of the power supply field: "serviceability" and "maintainability." He had been a reliability/maintainability engineer for power systems at a major computer manufacturer, and he felt that the power supply industry "paid fairly little attention to how to maintain a power system once [it was] installed in the field."
My first response was that people don't really worry much about this anymore. About 15 years ago, when distributed power systems were emerging, Bell Labs did a lot with reliability and serviceability. At that time, power electronics publications focused much more on these issues because designers wanted to ensure a reliable power supply for these new systems. All that effort obviously paid off, since reliability is so much better now than it used to be.
These days, "serviceability" comes more at the planning stage of the installation, with the idea that you're going to be monitoring the product more than fixing it. "Monitoring" is definitely a big issue in power supply systems, particularly in communications applications. And with computer applications, it's cheaper to just replace the whole power supply rather than fix it. In that sense, "hot-swapping" has replaced "maintaining."
In other words, the issue of service and maintenance is making only incremental advances in people's consciousness.
After discussing all this, the fellow wrote back to me and raised some good points. He said, "For all the Bellcore data and Mil Handbook 217 projections, power supplies still constitute a portion of system hardware failures. How that power supply or power system is designed and integrated into the ... equipment has a lot to do with meeting the manufacturer's original objectives."
This is true, but it raises the question of where "servicing" enters into the power supply equation. Is it the job of the "reliability/maintainability" engineer, or the research and development engineer designing the power supply? From what I'm gathering "out in the field," reliability is being placed squarely on the shoulders of the power supply designer, not the service and maintenance engineers.
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We would like to hear your comments on the topics discussed in this column. We welcome the opportunity to publish opposing opinions. Please email Jeff Shepard at jshepard@darnell.com.
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