Buck/Boost recommendation

[GaTech04]

Good afternoon all,

I work for a company that supplies medical equipment that is manufactured in Europe. The recommended voltage for the unit is 230/240V - dedicated 20A circuit, but of course most of the offices we work with are on 208Y/120 services.

I was wondering if anyone had dealt with similar situations (with tanning beds etc?).

Are there any buck/boost transformers that are "plug-and-play" that could bump the line voltage 10% or so? Most offices already have a 220V outlet installed and the plug on the unit matches - if we could just drop the tranformer in line that would be great.

Any suggestions are welcome, if I left out any pertinent information please let me know!

Thank you,
GT

 

[Jraef]

You have two issues: voltage and frequency. If your equipment has AC motors, frequency is a big issue for you, one not solved by a simple transformer. If your equipment does NOT have AC motors in it, you may be OK. Usually if there are no AC motors, it's because everything is running on DC which means there is an AC-DC converter. Most of those are now Switch Mode Power Supplies (SMPS) and usually have a very wide voltage tolerance. 208V may be just fine without doing anything else. Check the input voltage and frequency tolerance in detail before wasting a lot of time and money on this.

 

[GaTech04]

On our current units there are no AC motors - there is an inverter board and several power supplies that convert the voltage to DC. The installation specs on these for the electrical requirements are 207V - 264V (230/240 +/- 10%), 50/60 Hz. There are two line filters and a harmonic inductor that condition the power supply before reaching the inverter board.

On one of our older units ,there is an AC Induction Motor (230V, 60Hz, 0.11A) that controls rotational movement. If the supply voltage drops too much below 208V it can cause problems with this. Currently, there is a recommendation to use a 110V -> 220V buck boost transformer, but with this using the same phase for both legs, I assume that would cause issues.