Invest in reliability: Powermax plasma cutter

Hypertherm Powermax^® plasma cutters are well known for their robustness and reliability even when used for long periods in the harshest environments. Powermax plasma cutters are designed, tested, and manufactured to the highest standards to ensure they perform as expected for many years, often decades. It’s the best equipment investment you can make. 

Powermax product design and validation

Achieving high performance starts with a solid product design and validation. Examples of Hypertherm product design and validation:

• Clean side/dirty side power supply – a design isolates circuit board components effectively to prevent debris buildup on sensitive electronic components. 

• Powercool™ – airflow design that evenly cools the internal components for longevity. 

• Reliability testing – a series of stress tests of each new component or part to ensure it can survive the rugged environments where the products are often used.

• Highly Accelerated Life Testing (HALT) – we extrapolate the time to failure on prototype systems by conducting tests that induce stress conditions like what the product would see over many years of use. This is essential to identifying potential performance issues early and designing them out of the product. 

• Fully assembled beta systems are tested to extreme vibration, oscillation, temperature, humidity, and metal dust levels. We conduct impact tests on the power supplies and torches to ensure they can withstand abuse and use over the long term.

Testing and supplier qualification

After new Hypertherm products are released for manufacturing, many processes help ensure their reliability:

• Diagnostic testing and burn-in – every power supply goes through a burn-in cycle and completes a diagnostic test before being shipped.

• Test fire torches and cartridges – all torches and cartridges are fired to validate operation, reducing the chance of an out-of-the-box failure.

•  Supplier qualification – our rigorous supplier qualification process ensures we are sourcing the best components to meet our tight tolerances and high-performance standards.

What customers say about Powermax reliability

“Everybody [is] impressed so far. We are in week five now, with the original cartridge still being used. We recommend the [Powermax] SYNC machines.”
Redrock Machinery Ltd., Northern Ireland