Approaches to Minimize Murphy's Law Impact On “No single point of failure power supply systems.”

Abstract

Considering Murphy's law, “If anything can possibly go wrong, it will, and at the worst possible time”, there is a myriad of problems which need to be solved by “No single point of failure power supply systems” by designers, integrators and users. The paper covers factors to be considered in design, installation and maintenance in context of 30+years of experience and lesson learned approach to building redundant, fail-safe power supplies for mission critical applications. Aspects explored are output redundancy, input redundancy, programming and I/O fail safe and overcoming environment challenges. These environmental challenges include methods for deploying fault tolerant systems in high temperature, wet, dirty, corrosive and explosive applications.