New Industry Products

Conduction-Cooled 3.5kW Industrial Power Supplies

June 28, 2017 by Jeff Shepard

Adding to its expansive portfolio of power supply solutions, GE has introduced its CC3500 family of conduction-cooled power supplies, providing the ruggedness and reliability needed in demanding industrial applications. The units were specifically designed for end-use products where airflow and fan-cooling is either impractical or impossible.

The 3,500-W power supply channels heat to the surface of the unit, enabling it to cool via conduction when mated to an appropriate heat extraction surface such as a heat sink or cold plate -- eliminating the need for a fan or regular airflow. Eliminating the fan also allows the power supply to operate completely silently, a quality highly desired in noise-sensitive applications such as broadcast studios. In addition, since heat is removed by an integrated heat spreader, the power supply is ready-made for adaption to heat sinks or cold plates. This makes the CC3500 a logical choice for solutions such as industrial lasers, large-scale commercial printers and broadcast transmitters where alternate forms of cooling are already in place.

"Our new power supplies are well-suited for applications such as laser cutters or welders that you can find in many of today's advanced manufacturing facilities. The boxes that house the lasers are often in very close proximity to the equipment powering them," said Jim Montgomery, senior product manager, GE's Industrial Solutions. "Because lasers can put off tremendous heat and can create debris that can harm electrical equipment, having a fully enclosed, conduction-cooled design can help customers achieve their goals of protecting units and providing continuous operation."

While the cooling method may be different than GE's reputable CP3500 units, the CC3500 power supplies maintain the high reliability and efficiency customers expect. The CC3500 units can accommodate 100-120/200-240-Vac inputs and offer an extremely wide, programmable dc output voltage range of 18-53 Volts. The power supplies feature a compact, one-rack-unit-high form factor, and they can achieve a power density of 40 W/inch3 and efficiency levels of more than 96 percent.

Additional key features of GE's new fully enclosed, conduction-cooled power supplies include: No special training or knowledge is required to connect or to operate the units. They are designed for simple installation and adaptability to customer applications. The CC35000 power supplies feature the same internal architecture as their air-cooled GE siblings, enabling them to provide a mean time between failures of more than 5 million hours -- which allows for long-term reliability in harsh, unpredictable environments. The power supplies feature comprehensive input, output and over-temperature protection.

Adding to the flexibility of the CC3500 power supplies, they feature both RS485 and dual-redundant I2C communications busses, allowing for use in a broad range of applications. Also, the units are scalable and can be configured for parallel operation to support load sharing.

"Our CC35000 power supply family is the result of applying Fastworks methodology to one of our existing, well-respected solutions -- our CP3500 -- to create new units capable of meeting some of our industrial customers' toughest challenges," Montgomery continued. "Early in the design process, we met with customers to identify the factors they looked for most in a power supply. While we received feedback including ruggedness, fan-less operation and high efficiency, the biggest concern among the more than 25 customers we met with was how fast they could order and receive such a product. Knowing time-to-market was a top priority, and in consideration of all of the other feedback we received, we were able to develop three new CC35000 models in less than 10 months."