Interesting Facts About Uninterruptible Power Supplies (UPS)
A UPS protects your computers, mission critical equipment, and whatever other devices you have plugged into it, from four different power problems…voltage surges and spikes (voltage is greater than it should be), voltage sags (voltage is less than it should be), total power failure, and frequency differences (when the power is flowing at something other than 60 Hertz).
The world’s largest UPS, the 46-megawatt Battery Electric Storage System (BESS), in Fairbanks, Alaska, powers the entire city and nearby rural communities during outages. Hey, you could visit it if your company wins Johnston Technologies’ contest 10K2AK.
There are three common types of UPSs: online double-conversion, line-interactive, and offline/standby. In an online double-conversion UPS, the batteries are always connected to the inverter, so that no power transfer switches are necessary. Double-conversion UPSs are the safest, but most expensive kind of power protection. The line-interactive UPS is similar in operation to a standby UPS, but with the addition of a variable-voltage autotransformer. The offline/standby UPS (SPS) offers only the most basic features, providing surge protection and battery backup, which is more for a small business or your home.
Nobody can claim they invented the UPS. It is a combination of many theories and studies.
John Hanley patented the first UPS. He called it an “Apparatus For Maintaining An Unfailing and Uninterrupted Supply of Electrical Energy”. Wow, Uninterruptible Power Supplies (UPS), sold by Johnston Technologies, is sooo much shorter and easier to say
UPSs can be as small as a notebook or as large as a room. The difference in size depends on the amount of equipment being protected and how much battery backup time is required.
The most common reason for UPS failures is their batteries. UPS batteries must be consistently maintained to provide the utmost reliability.
The first UPSs were of rotary design, which utilized a flywheel to provide short intervals of backup power.
The life of UPS batteries depends on many conditions, including but not limited to, environmental conditions, power quality, number of discharges, and other batteries that are hooked up in the series.
Three-phase UPSs use either standard UPS batteries, that are common in legacy units, or plug-in-play batteries. Standard batteries are more difficult to change and require a manual testing procedure while plug-in-play batteries are automatically tested by the UPS and are designed to be easier to change.