N355 High Power Bidirectional Programmable DC Power Supply

On the N355, voltage-control or current-control loop priority can be selected to improve startup behavior and protect low-impedance DUTs.

Facility and control decisions before the order

For the N355, regeneration is a facility question before it is an instrument question: returning absorbed energy to the grid at up to 93% efficiency requires a site that will accept the back-feed, which means confirming the transformer, the protection settings and the agreement covering export. Master/master parallel operation is how the platform passes its up to 42 kW standalone power toward MW-level systems, so a programme expected to grow should be specified as a parallel group at the outset rather than as a single 3U unit. For remote control of the N355, CAN and CANopen suit a bench where the supply shares a bus with the DUT’s own controller, Modbus-RTU over RS485 suits a PLC-driven production cell, and SCPI over LAN suits a scripted lab sequencer.

Sizing a bidirectional supply for charge/discharge profiles

A bidirectional supply sized on steady-state current alone fails at the transitions rather than on the plateau, so size an N355 against the peak of the charge and discharge profile and against the zero crossing where the unit reverses direction under load. The N355’s specified voltage rise and fall time of ≤ 5 ms sets how quickly a commanded step actually arrives at the DUT, so a profile written in shorter steps than that is being averaged rather than executed. Accuracy is quoted with a full-scale term, 0.02% + 0.02% F.S. on voltage and 0.1% + 0.1% F.S. on current, which is the practical reason to choose between the 360 V and 2250 V families on the DUT’s real maximum rather than on headroom.