Many equipment failures, shutdowns, software interruptions, and data loss that are difficult to find the cause may be caused by power issues. This article refers to the description of power quality issues in IEEE standards, introduces several common types and causes of power disturbances, as well as the impact of power disturbances on key equipment and corresponding preventive measures.
In today’s technologically advanced era, we have become highly dependent on the continuous supply of electricity. In most countries and regions, commercial electricity is the power output provided by a national power grid consisting of many power plants. The power grid must not only meet the key needs of the government, industry, finance, commerce, healthcare, and communication industries, but also meet the basic national needs of housing, lighting, heating, cooling, air conditioning, and transportation. Commercial electricity is supporting the operation of today’s fast-paced modern world. High technology has deeply integrated into our homes and careers, and the emergence of e-commerce is constantly changing the way we communicate with the outside world, with APC UPS playing an increasingly important role.
Intelligent technology requires power sources to be unaffected by power outages or disturbances. The consequences of large-scale power accidents have been recorded, and research shows that industrial enterprises and light data centers suffer losses of billions of dollars annually due to power outages. The losses caused by other power quality issues also amount to billions of dollars. In industrial automation processing, all production lines will lose control, leading to dangerous situations for on-site workers and causing serious material waste. In large financial institutions, handling interruptions can result in irreparable losses of up to thousands of dollars per minute of downtime, followed by several hours of recovery time. Program termination and data damage caused by power outages may lead to issues with software recovery operations, which may take several weeks to resolve.
The root cause of many power problems lies in commercial power networks, whose thousands of kilometers of transmission lines are affected by various weather conditions such as hurricanes, thunderstorms, heavy snow, freezing, floods, and subsequent equipment failures, traffic accidents, and major conversion operations. The power issues that affect today’s high-tech equipment are often caused by various conditions within a building, such as civil engineering, heavy load starting, poor quality distribution components, and even common background electrical noise.
The widespread application of electronic products from household electronics to large-scale control devices, as well as the high energy consuming industrial processing industry, has increased people’s attention to power quality. Power quality is usually defined as any change in electrical energy, such as voltage, current, and frequency, that can disrupt the normal operation of electronic devices.
Electric power companies, industrial workshops, enterprises and even household users are all paying attention to the methods of controlling power quality. Further research shows that devices have become increasingly sensitive to instantaneous changes in power supply voltage, current and frequency. Unfortunately, many different terms are used in describing many existing electrical disturbance phenomena, which cause conceptual confusion. And it makes it more difficult to discuss, study and improve the current power quality problems. The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEE) has attempted to solve this problem by developing standards including definitions of electrical disturbances. The standard describes a number of power quality issues, and this article will discuss some of the most common ones.