Overview
Corporate executives face the daunting task of assuring the business is taking all steps possible to comply with diverse regulatory standards and regulations. Near the top of most lists are the needs to protect data integrity, to assure constant access to data and to eliminate any breaks in data.
Common among the many digital elements required to achieve compliance success is the need for resilient electric power. To assure electric power is available under all conditions, capital dollars are expended for backup power systems. This is where a monitoring system is required to indicate the functionality of the backup power system is dependable.
Every anomaly or outage in utility power has the potential to instantly corrupt the processes that our economy depends on daily. With every power disruption the lead acid battery, the heart of your power backup systems, supply power to ensure business continuity. Failure of any link within the power chain has the potential to corrupt data, interrupt networks and bring business to a halt.
UPS Battery Monitoring System- A battery monitor is a product that tracks, analyzes and reports on the condition of each individual battery in a system.
- Astro is using BTECH battery monitoring system
Why?
· Uses a pulsed DC impedance system that does not discharge the batteries during the measurement cycle.
· Its unaffected by AC ripple and does not use AC ripple to measure impedance. (uses test load of 2.5-10A RMS, produces results with a high signal to noise ratio and includes comprehensive noise analysis and filtering.)
· Single cell level monitoring wherever possible
The abovementioned points are advantages of the BTECH monitoring system.
How does battery monitoring (BTECH) work?
· A sensing wiring harness over each battery
· This harness is used to measure each individual battery cell voltage, impedance and temperature, plus the current and voltage during a discharge.
· This data is pooled by the BTECH software package
· The controller alerts the user for alarm conditions via various ways ( email, text etc.)
By knowing the battery’s baseline impedance, it is possible to correlate the impedance rise with a meaningful determination of the end of its service life.
BTECH Software
· Consists of two components:
i) Battery Validation System (BVS) Observer
ii) Battery Validation Manager (BVM)
· The Observer works as a listener. It collects and distributes data and alarms automatically from the system.
· The BVM is the primary user interface with the SCM600 and the archived
data. It stores and retrieves data (such as impedance, temperature, etc.) and plots its respective graphs.
Types of Alarm
· Maintenance Alarm
o Intended to advice the user that the values are moving closer to Critical Limits and should be monitored more closely
· Critical Alarm
o As the name suggests, it indicates that the values are exceeding its accepted limits. These are defined as below:
§ System Voltage – upper and lower float voltage values are used as the basis for calculating the battery string limits
§ Unit Voltage- battery manufactures established limits
§ Impedance- A value of 30% above either the average value of all the unit impedances or the initial impedance recorded for each unit
§ Temperature- upper and lower user defined limits that reflect environmental conditions at the battery location or a 15°F differential on any of the temperature sensors.
Recognizing, Acknowledging and Clearing Alarms
1) ALARM RECOGNITION
i. The (S5:find logo) logo turns red indicating the location has an alarm
ii. Click the expand tree
iii. Select “Alarms and Alerts” to show list of alarms
2) ALARM ACKNOWLEGDEMENT
i. Click on “Locations”
ii. Click on “Acknowledge Selected Location’s BVS Alarms and Alerts”
iii. If they are multiple alarms present, it is possible to “Acknowledge all BVS Alarms and Alerts”
3) CLEARING ALARMS
i. Click on the battery string icon
ii. Right click and select “Acknowledge Alarms”
iii. However, this clearance only applies to the alarms generated by the SCM600 software. The alarms generated and displayed on the battery map by the analysis software are only cleared when the condition that caused the alarm is restored
Real Time Mode
i) Click on “Communications”
ii) Select “Establish Communications with Controller”
iii) Click on “No” to retrieving the data from the controller
iv) Click on “Enable Real-time”
v) The view currently displayed is the real-time view
vi) When done, click “Disable Real-time to return to normal operation
