A low voltage, high current, modular 50 V, 700 A dc power
supply has been developed to bias 35 number of 500 W, 505.8 MHz
solid state RF amplifiers. This power supply incorporates 7 number
of 50 V, 100 A ac-dc power modules, operating in parallel to share
the load current. This power supply has two unique attributes namely
modular hot swappability and active redundancy. Hot swappable
feature incorporated in power modules enables isolation of faulty
power modules and facilitates their online replacement without
affecting the operation of RF amplifiers and remaining power
modules. Active redundancy increases reliability of the power supply
significantly. Both these features reduce the down time and increase
the availability of the overall system significantly. This paper
presents comparison of system reliability of this modular dc power
supply with other modular dc power supplies of same output voltage
and current rating and having different number of power
modules. Suitable mathematical expressions for system reliability of
these modular dc power supplies have been evaluated. This power
supply also has a digital controller for monitoring the status of 35
number of RF amplifiers and 7 number of power modules as well as
controls load current sharing among the power modules. This power
supply achieves current THD ≤ 6.2%, input power factor
≥ 0.98, output voltage stability ≤ 0.4% and peak to peak
output ripple ≤ 0.2% with overall system reliability and
availability approaching near 100%.