Baseplate-Cooled Supplies: Power Without a Fan

Some enclosures cannot have a fan in them. Sealed outdoor cabinets, dusty plant, food and washdown areas, anything where an air path means an ingress path — in all of these the heat has to leave by conduction instead. That is what a baseplate-cooled supply is built for.

How it works

Instead of moving air across the components, the supply channels its losses into a flat metal baseplate. You bolt that baseplate to a heatsink, a chassis panel or the enclosure wall, and the structure itself becomes the cooling. No fan means no filter to change, no bearing to wear out, and one fewer moving part in the failure count.

Two things decide whether it works in practice:

• Mounting surface — it must be flat, clean and big enough. The datasheet derating curve assumes a real thermal path, not a token bracket.
• Thermal interface — a thin, even layer of compound or a thermal pad. An air gap across a baseplate undoes the whole design.

What we stock

We currently list 75 baseplate-cooled units: 63 in the AC/DC range, from Mean Well, Chuanglian and Arch, and 12 DC/DC converters from Yuan Dean. They cover the usual industrial output voltages, and the AC/DC side runs well up into the hundreds of watts.

Browse AC/DC power supplies, see the DC/DC converter range, or tell us your baseplate temperature and we will check the derating for you.