In my previous article, I shared on how to improve the efficiency and prolong the lifespan of our power supplies by maintaining a 50% loading and how you can use the LED display of Phoenix Contact’s Quint 4 power supply as a visual indication of the output power in order to achieve that.

This display is also useful in redundant power applications to ensure power supplies are of 50% loading without the use of multi-meter to measure and check.

When it comes to redundant power supplies, diode modules will be used as a de-coupling function but how about balancing of the output power loading between the 2 power supplies?

Usually you will need 4 multi-meters to balance the voltage and the current at the output side during Factory Acceptance Test (FAT) and Site Acceptance Test (SAT).

In practice, this is not only tedious but also a waste for time because the moment the output load current changes or the output voltage has a difference of more than 0.3 V, both power supplies will be unbalanced, resulting in one power supply undertaking 100% load and the other is in the “sleeping” mode.

When this happens, power redundancy as well as the life span of the power supply is compromised.

Redundant Power Supply Application

Phoenix Contact’s QUINT ORING resolves this issue of unbalanced loading using our proprietary Auto Current Balancing (ACB) Technology and the QUINT 4’s Bar graph LEDs display; reducing the requirement from 4 multi-meters to only one.

https://youtu.be/sbhSe7RXRpc