This is a custom designed power supply to drive a 24V 1.5A portable medical diagnostic unit with full medical isolation from an automotive 12V battery. It has protection against typical automotive transients including load dump. A critical parameter was high efficiency as the supply is housed in a plastic box. We achieved 83% efficiency from input terminals to output terminals at full power so the maximum loss was under 7.5W.

This power supply was designed for a Pentium based PC104 embedded computer for a portable application. It works from a 14V secondary battery with a primary battery backup. It has two outputs. The main output is 5V at 4A continuous and 7.5A during the computer boot up sequence. The second output is 9V at 2A continuous and 2.5A peak. A very important parameter was high efficiency to maximise battery life. We achieved 88% at boot-up and 93% during normal operation.

In addition, this particular board variation included two switched outputs and a medically isolated auxiliary supply.

This gas production rig in Liverpool Bay has three platforms. Two are made of mild steel and the control platform is a jack-up using a high tensile steel. Each platform has its own set of sacrificial anodes but the direct mechanical and electrical connection of the high tensile steel rig to the mild steel ones would result in a corrosion battery. This means that the protection on one rig would partially cancel that on the other, leading to accelerated corrosion of the structure. To combat this, all the bridge components and pipes to the control platform are insulated and a DC voltage source makes up the difference in potential to cancel the corrosion battery.

This power supply was developed for an instrument manufacturer to provide very clean supplies for signal conditioning amplifiers with precision filters. The power supply has four synchronous buck converters. These provide ±15 volts at 2.5 amps on one printed circuit board and +5 volts at 2.5 amps with +5 volts at 1 amp on a second board. Output line noise was measured at less than 1mV rms and 5mV p-p.