I am curious to what you are using for inrush limiting.  Sorry if you already 
told us but I missed that.  

Regards,
Bob LaFrance
N9NEO
Design Engineer
Creare Inc.
16 Great Hollow Road
Hanover, NH 
603-640-2539


-----Original Message-----
From: CR [mailto:[email protected]] 
Sent: Wednesday, September 16, 2015 2:56 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [PSES] Unexplained High Fallout of Power Supplies

On 9/15/2015 4:53 PM, Kunde, Brian wrote:
> we have not been able to find the reason for the fallout. The power 
> supplies have all shown arc damage to the AC front end, signs of 
> arcing and traces burned or vaporized, blown fuses, and shorted FETs 
> and/or Rectifiers. These failures have occurred on several different 
> locations, on different power supply models, different manufactures 
> and on different instruments. Some instruments have been in service 
> for years; some for only a few weeks before they fail. Some 
> instruments even have surge suppression modules installed and though 
> the power supplies fail the surge modules tested out fine. The 
> failures did not occur during any known lightning storm or any other 
> known transient.
Brian,

The circumstances you describe -- arcing with no external transient seen
-- point to an on-board occurrence, not an external one.  I'd suspect (in no 
particular order and on little information -- heh) ) PWB material with 
insufficient dielectric withstand, and/or oscillation in a power FET due to its 
characteristics (or another device's) having changed enough to make the control 
loop unstable.  You might have an oscillator the controller can't even detect.

I'm on LinkedIn if you need help, eh?

Cortland Richmond

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