Design and Realization of a Compact, Rugged and Highly Efficient Power Supply Module for Large Aperature Antennas in Naval Environment

Operation of any long range radar involves detection and tracking of targets from a range of thousands of kilometers. It is necessary to use large active aperture array antenna for this purpose with thousands of transmit receive modules which in turn are required to be powered by hundreds of Power Supply Modules (PSMs) in each antenna array. Each such Power Supply Module is required to provide power to optimum number of Transmit Receive Modules (TRMs) co-located within the same Motherboard. Since the mounting, location and the volume available for a PSM within the motherboard is fixed, the PSMs have to be realized within that finite available volume only. At the same time, it has to incorporate an appropriate number of DC-DC converters of requisite output power to provide sufficient power to the TRMs. In this paper, we present the challenges in design and realization of such a compact and rugged PSM which provides input DC power to all its co-located TRMs within the Motherboard and at the same time does not cause any thermal issue owing to its significant heat dissipation. Moreover, the PSM handles multiple types of loads and can command independent switching OFF/ON operation for each load uniquely. The module offers full redundancy in terms of DC-DC converters and ensures high reliability. Besides this, the PSM encompasses a wide variety of protection features. It is qualified as per MIL-STDs and can be seamlessly reused for scaled up applications. The PSM has been realized, qualified, tested and successfully performance evaluated during field trials.