Important guidelines and safety precaution for battery management in UPS and other applications

Abstract

Computers and communication equipments need uninterrupted quality power for proper functioning. Electrical power is the most essential item for Industries and Institutions. The electricity consumer never worries about the quality of the power supplied to him. The most obvious defects in mains supply are complete interruption, voltage dips or sags. Power defects during disk or DVD read and writes operations may destroy the medium. Sometimes the operating system may be corrupted. In a worst case scenario, a hardware failure may occur in the mother board or the input / output interface cards. Computations which take days and months may be interrupted in the middle and it has to be run again wasting precious time. In order to provide uninterrupted, quality power to computers and communication equipments, normally uninterruptible power supply (UPS) is used. The energy stored in the batteries is used when interruption comes. If high quality power is required, then the power is always taken from the batteries by converting the DC supply to AC supply by means of inverters and the batteries are always charged by rectifiers. This scheme has a well defined voltage magnitude, fixed frequency and good sinusoidal waveforms assuring quality power. As the sensitive equipments are powered by UPS and UPS always takes energy from the batteries, one has to have a good knowledge of handling batteries and its maintenance. This technical note summarizes some of the important technical aspects in operating maintaining battery system.