In March this year, Powersolve Electronics purchased XP Energy Systems, a specialist distributor and manufacturer of industrial, uninterruptible power supplies, dc-ac inverters and ac-dc and dc-dc power supplies for the oil and gas industries and other Industrial sectors. XP Energy Systems is well established in this market, and is a vastly experienced provider of power systems to customers in these demanding industries. The company has a wide range of products with power ratings up to many kilowatts, details of which can be found at www.xpenergystems.com. The company recently moved from its premises in Pangbourne, Berkshire, to Powersolve's Newbury headquarters, where there is more space to hold stock, particularly of the uninterruptible power supplies, which are normally available off-the-shelf.
According to Powersolve's managing director, Peter Clark, XP Energy Systems is a valuable addition to his company as it opens up markets other than those that it had traditionally dealt with. "They have brought with them a lot of new business that we can build on to grow our own business over the next few years," he says. Both companies are part of the XP Power PLC group of companies.
Other new developments at Powersolve include the introduction this year of many new dc-dc converters from the Switzerland based power partner, Tracopower - one of the world's largest suppliers of dc-dc converter products. Also new are very compact 150W 2 x 4in and 250W 3 x 5in footprint, single output ac-dc power supplies from Emerson Network Power (formerly Astec), whose products Powersolve has been distributing for many years.
Partner products aside, Powersolve has also been very busy developing its own products, not least being the new 400W convection or base-plate cooled, single-output power supply for use in applications where fan cooling is either undesirable or not an option. This product is available in single output versions of 5V, 12V, 24V or 48Vdc with a 5V standby output and remote shutdown facility. A standard feature of these power supplies are the integral OR'ing diodes for N+1 redundancy and circuit boards that are conformal-coated for operation in harsh environments. The power supply is also able to operate over a temperature range of -25ºC to +70ºC with no de-rating. This product is fully EMC tested and meets all safety approvals, and should be available from stock within the next few weeks. Powersolve believes that there are very few products like this available on the market at present and generally if you wanted to operate up to a temperature of +70ºC you would have to specify a power supply at double this power rating and de-rate it by 50%.
Other new products in the pipeline include a new range of low cost, Energy Star, ac-dc adaptors for use in applications where input power is required to be less than 0.5W in no load condition. These products are currently available in power ratings from 15W to 80W but new higher power versions will be available over the coming months, as will open frame versions based on the Energy Star platform. Meanwhile, on the custom side, other new products under development include microprocessor-controlled chargers for lithium polymer batteries.
With these new products and those of newly acquired Energy Systems, Powersolve is looking forward to a successful 2009, despite all the talk of recession, and company anticipates increasing its turnover significantly next year.