Paralleling power supplies for more power without compromising performance!

A year ago my colleague here, Gary, provided a posting “How can I get more power from my power supplies?” (Click here to review). He describes connecting power supplies in series for higher voltage or in parallel for higher current. Along with suggested set ups a list of requirements and precautions are also provided.

Connecting multiple power supplies in parallel operating as voltage sources is always problematic as there will be some imbalance of voltage between them. That’s why, in this previous posting, one unit operates as a voltage source and the remaining paralleled units operate in constant current. The compliance voltage limit of all the units operating in constant current need to be set higher than the master in operating in constant voltage in order to maintain this operation. This is illustrated in Figure 1.

Figure 1: Operating power supplies in parallel for higher power

As long as a high level of loading is maintained the paralleled units remain in their respective operating modes (in this case at least 2/3 loading). However, what happens if you cannot maintain that high level of loading? It is possible in practice to operate at lighter loads with this approach. In this case it is important to set the voltage levels of all the units the same. Now what happens is when the units are fully loaded they operate as already described, with the lowest voltage unit remaining in constant voltage. But when they are unloaded the lower voltage units transition to unregulated operation and the highest voltage unit then maintains the overall output in constant voltage. This is shown in Figure 2, for 0 to 1/3 loading.

Figure 2: Conditions of power supplies connected in parallel at light loading

There is a bit of performance compromises as a result. The transition between the lowest and highest voltage limits adds to the voltage regulation. Also, due to different units experiencing mode crossover transitions between constant voltage, constant current and unregulated operating modes transient voltage performance suffers considerably.

An improvement on this direct paralleling approach is having a master-slave arrangement with control signals to maintain current sharing across units. Our N5700A and N8700A series power supplies use such a control arrangement as depicted in Figure 3, taken from the N5700A user’s guide.

Figure 3: N5700A Connection for parallel operation (local sensing used)

With this arrangement the master unit, operating in constant voltage, provides an analog current programming output signal to the slave unit, operating in constant current. In this way the two units equally share the load current across a wide range of load current.

Still, having multiple units with only one in constant voltage does not provide as good of dynamic performance as a single voltage source of higher power.  A unique and innovative approach was taken with our N6900A / N7900A series Advance Power System (APS) to support seamless parallel operation without compromising performance. The paralleling arrangement for our N6900A / N7900A series APS is depicted in Figure 4.

Figure 4: N6900A / N7900A series APS Connection for parallel operation

The N6900A / N7900A series APS paralleling arrangement also uses an analog control signal for driving current sharing. However with this arrangement there is no master or slaves. All units remain in constant voltage while equally sharing current. This provides the user with an easy way to scale a power system as required without having to worry about compromising performance.