To help meet the need for more power from smaller-capacity rectifiers, ABB Power Conversion has developed a new bay interface card, BIC-11. With the upgraded bay interface card, maximum GPS-series power system capacity can be increased from 11,000 amps (A) to more than 20,000A.

The bay interface card enables a single system controller to interface with, monitor, and control up to 192 GP100 or NE075 rectifiers – with up to eight cards supported per system controller. It also allows customers to incrementally build out larger power systems with smaller-capacity rectifiers (utilizing smaller, more cost-effective AC breakers) to meet their evolving power needs.

This ability to build out larger power systems is critical to meet today’s requirements of facilities with high power demands such as DC data centers, central offices, and cable head-end centers.

Going forward, BIC-11 will be an available option for all new GPS-series power systems, and it also will be available to retrofit and expand existing systems.

Additional features of the BIC-11-enabled GPS Power Systems include onboard temperature monitoring that provides a bay-level indication of the cabinet temperature, an additional shunt input (compared to previous versions), and RS-485 concentrator functionality.