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To: hmaly who wrote (164384)7/10/2005 12:36:18 PM
From: Joe Senesac of 275872
 
I know quite a bit about this due to my work over the past 13 years in biotech manufacturing.

The same sorts of designs for the cleanroom backup power are in place for biotech relative to fabs. You generally have 4 major elements:

1) large diesel generator or generators for supply to all key power outlets in building
2) very fast switchgear to rapidly change from incoming utility supply to generator
3) "building UPS unit" which is very large battery unit to cover the initial 50-100 ms period during switchover, and then provide smoothing of the supply during the rest of the period while the generator is getting up to full run. This is a very large unit, think of a pallet sized UPS about 5 feet tall
4) local UPS units to provide conditioned power to any equipment that is still fussy about switchover

The switchover time period is the key - for some pieces of equipment, dealing with a 50 ms interruption of power is not a problem, for others it might as well have been completely switched off. Essentially is subject to a complete "reboot", whatever that means for a given equipment, which can be disastrous if in the middle of a production run. Therefore, the building "UPS" unit is a key part of the design. We learned about how important this is after the facility was already operational and had to retrofit a building UPS into the design.

The local UPS units can still be important, to help further condition the electrical signal during periods of noise - such as brownouts or these switchover events.

Not an electrical engineer, but a biologist/chemist. Was a biotech facilities manager for about a year.

Joe
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