Electronic – Can a power adapter give out hazardous voltage

mainspower supplyswitch-mode-power-supply

In an application, I use an industrial AC-DC power adapter, the meanwell GST160A15.
The power adapter gives 15V@144W maximum power.
I carefully read the datasheet, and it states that the power adapter has overvoltage protection, 105 ~ 135% of output voltage.
My question is, in case of fault, can the power adapter give out an hazardous voltage? With hazardous I refer standard convention for wet locations, 70V DC or 33 V r.m.s and 46.7 V peak

Best Answer

Under no-fault conditions that type of power supply can be assumed to produce 15 volts (plus or minus a small percentage due to build up of tolerances and temperature coefficients). If part of the the voltage regulation circuit failed it could produce a voltage significantly higher than 15 volts and this is where a lot of designs use an independent crow bar circuit to clamp the voltage to an avarage safe limit should a component in the main circuit fail.

I suspect that design has protection against single component fails and uses a crow-bar circuit (as do a lot of designs that are certified CE). Some designs don't but they rely on an extensive analysis of what can happen under single fault/failure conditions.

I expect that if you look in the product data sheet there will be some information about this. As to whether this power supply is suitable for the environment type you wish to use it, read the data sheet.