Eliminating downtime

Revolutionary storage solution for UPS eliminates downtime in industry

In an industrial world in which even a few minutes of production outage has significant cost impact, it is essential to keep power flowing to machinery during periods of power grid instability.

ABB has developed the PCS100 UPS-I (Industrial Uninterruptable Power Supply) as a power protection solution that is capable of meeting CAPEX targets while beating traditional systems in the ongoing battle to maximize product yield and productivity as well as reduce downtime.

The innovative features of the UPS-I include batteries based on recent ultracapacitor advances. The batteries incorporate a spiral plate design that allows a very low cell resistance, so they are capable of providing large amounts of current for a short time, making them ideal for short-term storage requirements.

The advantages of this feature were highlighted by a project to stabilize the power supply for one of Malaysia’s largest and longest-established manufacturers of semiconductor products. As a high-tech company, they employ sophisticated equipment and this tends to be very sensitive to instabilities in the power supply.

They have continually been confronted with loss of production and revenue caused by power fluctuations. Losses can be as high as the cost of resuming operations, and scrapping damaged products can amount to millions of dollars. Six 900 kVA UPS-I units were supplied and installed, and these successfully eliminated voltage disturbances, resulting in a disruption-free production process.

The ultracapacitor storage option is ideal for high-reliability applications where short duration backup is required. I’d even describe this storage solution as revolutionary. What do you think?

Read the full article to find out more about maintaining power flow during grid instabilities