Case study: Combating outages helps protect scientific institution’s research reputation

Research experiments often run 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and use sensitive equipment that can be affected by even the smallest fluctuation in power. A voltage sag, also known as a brownout, can cause experiments to fail and lose data to be lost, leaving institutions with not only a practical and monetary costs but also a reputational risk.

Scientific equipment can fail when a building experiences momentary dips in the power supply from the grid. These are not sufficient to kick in the back-up generators but could potentially impact work being done by scientists.

Although outages may not be frequent, the voltage issues caused by network faults, weather or other power cable events are ubiquitous. With the advent of automation in modern commercial set-ups, the sensitivity of process to power quality events is growing. Faults or weather events in the utility network can lead to voltage sags well below the nominal value and stay there for a number of seconds. Such fluctuations can stop the operation of sensitive equipment.

With the advent of automation in modern commercial set-ups, the sensitivity of process to power quality events is growing. Faults or weather events in the utility network can lead to voltage sags well below the nominal value

With this in mind, The Francis Crick Institute employed an electrical consultant to investigate solutions to this issue and thereby provide research teams with peace of mind that valuable experiments and data could be protected.

Lee Downes, Senior Project Manager for the Facilities & Infrastructure Team at the ‘Crick’ explained: “Our role is to provide scientific groups with the best working environment for their research needs and ensure everything runs as smoothly as possible at all times of day and night.

“We started to log both the equipment failures and the electrical supply anomalies and were soon able to determine that problems occurred with a sag incident. It is surprising that in spite of our back-up generators and UPS solutions, even the tiniest voltage sag could cause a problem, but it often did. The sags from the grid were not able to be avoided or mitigated by our power provider and so we knew we had to resolve the problem in-house.” 

An electrical consultant carried out comprehensive research into possible solutions and then Lee Downes approached Sentridge Control, the automation and control systems company and supplier of ABB products in the UK, forhelp.

Institutions more often than not have standby generators and some uninterruptable power supply (UPS) solutions, such as batteries, to alleviate the problem of complete black-outs of power. This sort of back up equipment requires regular maintenance and testing and can take up valuable space. 

AVCs (Active Voltage Conditioners) are another option to provide protection against voltage events. ABB, the global technology leader in electrification and automation, has developed a unique AVC product specifically designed for commercial and industrial applications that responds quickly to voltage surges and sags, corrects for voltage imbalance, and removes voltage flicker.

This system eliminates the use of expensive batteries and draws the extra energy needed to make up the correction voltage from the utility supply. This means there are no maintenance costs, which are commonly associated with batteries. It includes advanced control software, a reliable converter platform, and offers 99 percent efficiency.

Phil Tomkinson of Sentridge Control said: “Following a site visit we designed a solution using the ABB PCS100 AVC-40 product to fit within the switch rooms and worked with Lee and his team to ensure the installation meant minimal downtime. Any sag in voltage of up to 40% is corrected automatically – meaning no costly downtime and in the case of the Crick, no loss of valuable data.”

Since the commissioning at the start of 2023, there have been five logged events that were successfully corrected with no loss of loads detailed Tomkinson.

Mark Johnson, Service Delivery - Senior Project Manager at the Crick commented on the solution: “Being able to provide our research teams with the highest quality environment means they can have the confidence to proceed with their vital research without the fear of loss of data or interruption of experiments.”