A new power supply has been designed by R Stahl's explosion protection division that can supply more power to field devices while remaining intrinsically safe. With rack space at a premium and constant pressures to drive the cost of systems down, having the ability to produce a wide range of voltages and currents with one system power supply instead of several is very beneficial. Omron's MYS general purpose relays are used in applications that include industrial control, as well as commercial and domestic equipment/installations. New advances in power supply technology provide higher levels of monitoring and process control. Scientific experiments can also be influenced by power supply effects. Contributing effects such as output accuracy, stability, ripple and regulation are discussed. Cliff Scapellati reports. Freescale Semiconductor Inc is claiming to have solved conflicts for designers and improved atime to engineering success' with the introduction of an advanced front end power amplifier module. Latest research suggests medical device manufacturers will spend significantly more on electrical and electronic components during 2005. qqqMore than a third (36percent) plan to spend more in this area and a further 39percent will at least match last year's budget. qqq What distinguishes a well designed power supply? Most might say reliability. But equally important is the behaviour of the power supply. If the specs of a power supply do not meet the specs of the equipment, then the end result would be a complete, unreliable product. qqqRien Giltay reports. The transformer supplied protection devices are being applied as a self sufficient protection for different operating equipment, in energy plants with one relatively unsafe auxiliary voltage supply. The release capacitor, which is integrated into the device, holds the stored energy in readiness for the final tripping of the coils of a circuit breaker in case of defect. X-ray generators, which produce the tightly-controlled power needed to drive and control X-ray tubes, are becoming more versatile. This is being driven by the need for the output of many X-ray systems to be controlled more finely and a growing need to protect ever-more-expensive tubes.qqq Wireless technologies such as the short range Bluetooth specification are starting to be used to improve the safety of high voltage power systems. Custom designed high voltage power supplies can be found in instruments for spectroscopy, capillary electrophoresis, mass spectrometry, electrospray, lasers, spectrometers, X-ray diffraction, X-ray fluorescence, and many other analytical imaging and process applications. Cliff Scapellati reports. Malcolm Barnett looks at a low cost microcontroller with integrated analogue to digital converters which can be used in scientific and industrial applications. LCD Monitors are set to continue their year on year growth according to the latest forecasts from Meko's DisplayCast market research service. It is well known that rapid production of prototype plastic parts is common engineering practice, it is less well known that the same applies for thin gauge metal components. Key features of IGBTs compared with power MOSFETs include: higher current density; higher turn-offqqqenergy Eoff; flatter conduction loss with changes in current and temperature. prev    next