Alencon, an optimizer manufacturing company based in Pennsylvania, announced that the company has completed a significant expansion at its manufacturing and research and development headquarters, located in Hatboro, just outside of Philadelphia.
As part of this expansion, Alencon has significantly expanded its R&D lab facilities to support the further improvement of its current products and development of new alternative energy power electronics technologies and products; improved the facility’s energy efficiency; and doubled the company’s staff, with many of the hirings coming during 2021, in anticipation of the expansion.
“The rapid growth of DC-based clean energy sources and loads such as solar, battery energy storage, electric vehicles, and fuel cells have created rapidly increased demand for Alencon’s DC:DC converter products,” said Alencon Systems President, Hanan Fishman. “Alencon is one of very few suppliers of the alternative energy hardware that manufactures its products here in the U.S.”
The upgraded manufacturing and R&D facility includes number of unique features, headlined by a dedicated 1 MW grid connection. Additionally, the facility has a rooftop solar array and over 500 KW of programmable DC power supplies.
Alencon’s R&D facility also includes extensive thermal testing capabilities, allowing the company to perform accelerated life testing under the harshest real-world conditions, ensuring that the products are devloped to meet a lifetime of potential conditions and usages.
The company’s manufacturing facility is a certified UL manufacturing plant that is regularly audited by the nationally recognized testing laboratories that provide UL certification.
Last October, Alencon was awarded its seventh U.S. patent for the company’s Bi-Directional Optimizer for Storage Systems (BOSS). BOSS is designed to enable the granular control of charge and discharge of individual battery racks through a process called galvanic isolation. According to the company, a galvanically isolated DC-DC converter serves the dual purpose of mapping PV voltage to battery voltage while” isolating the differential grounding schemes that could be present.”
Alencon described galvanic isolation as an effective method of breaking ground loops by preventing unwanted current from flowing between two units sharing a ground conductor. This feature is intended to improve battery energy storage system (BESS) safety by allowing batteries to float as intended by their manufacturer while being isolated from the rest of the system.
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