• Power Protection

Power protection contains special challenges unique to the plant engineer or industrial facilities manager.  First, though, is accepting the very need for adequate power protection in a plant setting - process control equipment is just as prone to power-related shutdowns and downtime disruptions as are data processing computers. 

In fact, a study was once conducted that showed a slight power interruption of just 16 milliseconds can cause shutdown of a computer system, and the same holds true for industrial electronics.  A microprocessor in a control system is just as sensitive as one in an office computer.

Power Protection In Industrial Settings: Are There Different Requirements?

Indeed, the presence of dirty power is just as widespread in a factory environment as in an office building.  The poor and inconsistent quality of incoming utility lines has been well documented, and process control electronics are very sensitive to power sags, surges and even those millisecond-long power interruptions.  (Many users think of outages only in terms of several minutes or hours, but that's not the case;  interruptions occur much more frequently, yet they are so brief that people often are not aware of them.)

The factory environment itself is also just as likely to create internal power surges and sags, as electric motors and other heavy equipment place momentary draws or surges through a facility's power system.  And, there are processes in a factory that are just as critical as in the data center, such as rollers or other rotating type load processes that can't stop for a moment, when even a momentary 10-second disruption while a generator comes on line is too long. 

As PCs move to the factory floor with greater frequency, they in turn are controlling more and more critical applications and require UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply) protection.  One misconception sometimes heard among industrial users of power is a tendency to assume a factory power system has some inherent "ride through" capability not present in office environments.  That's obviously not the case.  Before purchasing any power protection equipment, Liebert recommends pre-site analysis of power conditions in that site in order to determine accurately the level of power problems and likely internal causes that could be isolated.

Configurations Unique to Industrial Environments.  While the electrical system design for a UPS is similar in either an office or factory, there are two areas we have seen that are not uncommon in an industrial setting.  For example, it's common in older manufacturing environments to find corner grounded or ungrounded delta utility configurations, which is outside of the standard configuration typically used in commercial building design. 

These delta utility configurations create grounding issues, isolation issues, and noise and operational problems if the UPS isn't designed to anticipate them.  For instance, it could cause the UPS to sense that the utility feed has moved out of range and begin to draw down batteries.

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