The UPS battery is key to the overall reliability and availability of a power protection system. It supplies the critical load if the mains fails or exceeds acceptable voltage or frequency limits. Also, the battery’s cost is a significant part of the UPS, so its care and management is essential as part of a UPS maintenance plan.
Why is UPS Battery Maintenance Important?
Batteries need protection from life-shortening factors, and management to ensure correct charging and advanced, effective diagnostics. Lack of battery care and management is the primary cause of system downtime. By contrast, the PW UPS series has a battery management system and protection features delivering optimised battery lifetime, runtime and performance.
What Factors Affect the Battery’s Lifespan?
Elevated temperatures and the number of discharge-recharge cycles are the greatest threats to battery life. For example, a battery’s projected life of 10 years at 20°C is reduced to less than 3 years at 40°C. Battery life expectancy is also reduced by both the number of charge-discharge cycles and by the depth of the discharges. These include short term events such as large step changes in UPS load.
How KOHLER’s PW Systems are Built to Tackle These Issues
PW UPS systems incorporate intelligent, flexible battery management (FBM) technology which insulates the UPS battery within a protected and managed environment. The battery connects to the charger/rectifier and inverter via SCRs rather than directly. These block negative impact disturbances and particularly AC Ripple, a major cause of internal battery temperature increase and pole deterioration. Also, an FBM algorithm optimises the battery charge voltage for the ambient temperature to further prolong battery life.
FBM minimises the number of battery discharges by providing wide input voltage and frequency ranges. Also, separating the battery from the DC link prevents damaging short term high current discharges during a step change in load. FBM uses two types of test to proactively detect a faulty battery, preventing sudden catastrophic failure online.
The FBM provides continuous and proactive monitoring and control of the battery’s environment, charge current and voltage. This gives PW UPS users a new level of confidence in their UPS’s support of optimised battery life coupled with protection from catastrophic failure.
