Salom Recycles Burn-In Power to Reduce Carbon Footprint
Salom PSU Burn-In energy recovery system
With the increasing focus on energy savings and associated Carbon Footprint reduction, Salom has closely analysed its manufacturing operations and quickly identified that the switching power supply (psu)‘burn-in operation is a significant source of energy waste and CO2 emission. This extended environmental testing (often called Highly Accelerated Stress Screening or ‘HASS’) is a common production step for a psu where accelerated thermal and electrical stresses are applied to an agreed portion of the manufactured product for extended periods whilst continuously monitoring the output to detect probable failures arising from component or manufacturing defects that would result in product failure at the early stage or its lifetime …the so called ‘early failure stage’ of the bathtub curve. This helps to ensure that the product functions as expected over its entire service life. In this operation, the test load is set to ensure that the psu is fully loaded for a set period and the load power would then normally be dissipated as heat. This may not be significant when powering individual units, but the nature of this volume manufacturing operation means that several thousand units can be tested in parallel, resulting in many thousands of wasted KW power and tonnes of CO2e.
To address this, Salom has implemented a new burn-in test system where the test rack acts as the psu load, so the psu dc power can be recovered and converted back to AC through a grid tied inverter to reduce the grid AC power and associated CO2e. This basic outline is illustrated below;
As can be seen in the comparative savings below, the important factor in the calculation is the ‘Comprehensive Energy Recovery’ Rate. This depends on the power consumed and efficiency of all stages of the energy recover system, the psu ‘burn-in’ power (load) and numerous other factors where the end result has been carefully validated with actual power measurements. As a consequence of this, the calculation shows that burn in testing of a full rack of typical 40W consumer electronics psu’s with 90% efficiency could recycle ~62MW of power/month and save in excess 38 tonnes of CO2e / month!
Whilst the actual annual manufactured quantity of a given psu could be considerably larger than the numbers that go through the burn-in testing, these savings are significant and only increase with higher quantities and higher power levels. These are areas that Salom is well established to support. We see this is a great first step in reducing the Carbon Footprint associated with our manufacturing operations and are excited by future investments to continue our lead in this area.
For further information or inquiries on sustainable power solutions, please don’t hesitate to contact us;
Andy Richardson – CEng MIET , info@salomeurope.com Vice President Business Development, Salom Europe Ltd
About Salom: Salom is a leading global manufacturer of power supplies for consumer electronics products. As a manufacturing partner for global brands, Salom has produced in excess of 3Bn power suppliers since our formation. Salom products are trusted by some of the most successful electronics companies in the world, quietly and efficiently powering devices across the globe for more than 40 years.