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KIT's Spinoff 'Digital Power Systems' Develops Ultralong-lived Industrial Power Supplies:
Switching power supplies are omnipresent in our daily life, may it be in households, offices, or industry. They convert the alternating current supplied into direct current for smartphones, laptops, charging stations of e-cars, and logistics and computing centers. However, conventional power supplies usually have to be exchanged after nine years of permanent operation. Digital Power Systems (DPS), a spinoff of Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), has now developed and tested power supplies with a lifetime of 50 years.
Conventional switching power supplies are light and compact, but highly susceptible to failure due to the electrolyte capacitors they contain. Film capacitors are far more long-lived. So far, however, they have needed up to ten times more space. "We have now developed a digital control process, by means of which film capacitors can be used on smaller space," DPS Director Michael Heidinger says. [...]
[...] The novel digital control process allows for the use of film capacitors with a slightly increased space requirement only. For control purposes, a microprocessor is integrated in the power supply. It detects disturbing ambient impacts and balances large voltage fluctuations of the film capacitor. As a result, storage capacitors of smaller capacity are sufficient. Heidinger explains that powerful microprocessors have made this possible.
I've had to replace a number of electrolytic capacitors in several of my home appliances over the years, so I can appreciate this development, but do you think the concepts "lifetime of 50 years" and "integrated microprocessor" generally compatible?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by hubie on Friday January 20, @01:27PM (1 child)
It's funny you mention Tek scopes because I was thinking about those when I typed that comment. We still have some of the old phosphor screen scopes kicking around and I know they'll fire right up and run, but to be fair, they haven't been running all this time. Actually one did run for a very long time, but that was because it was part of a timing setup where we were actually using the plug-in modules for pulse delay and a few other timing things and we still kept a bunch of the old modules around as 1-for-1 swap-ins if any of those pieces fail. (We tossed the last of our Polaroid camera hoods many years ago; I always loved to show those to the newbies to show we saved off our data "back in the day."). We've had newer scopes fail, but the repair there seems to be just give you a new card since scopes seem to be just Windows machines running a very fancy plug-in cards (or is it the other way, very fancy DSP cards with a plugin single board computer?).
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Saturday January 21, @04:26AM
When I was a kid, maybe 10, my dad would borrow a Tek from time to time for me, so I fell in like with them then. I've tried many brands, but I got very spoiled.
Most of them have analog power supplies, so most of the electrolytic caps are only seeing 120 Hz. Like you mentioned, they get minimal use. But many electrolytics, especially very old ones, can dry out just sitting unused, and then they stop working.
I have one of the ones that use plugin modules. Someone gave it to me. It had a dead shorted tantalum cap that I found pretty quickly. They made an amazingly wide array of modules for those things.
I have one USB "Hantek" that's mostly meant for automotive diagnosis, but can work for whatever. It has 8 BNC inputs. I forget the sample rate, but it's high enough for lots of stuff. I need to actually connect it to some sensors in my car and figure out what the heck is going on...