Chloride Launches Mega-Efficient Megawatt UPS

Chloride has launched a new UPS system designed for data centres with a claimed maximum efficiency of up to 99 percent. The company said that its new 9.6MW Trinergy Class 1 UPS was the most energy-efficient product of its type.

The name stems from the UPS’s three modes of operation. These are key to its efficiency, said technical support manager Rob Tanzer, and their efficiency savings could save up to £1 million over a lifetime of ten years. The company said that it had combined the best of two standard modes of operation: bypass, or maximum energy saving, where power passes through the unit with neither conditioning nor smoothing, and maximum power control, which passes the three-phase power input through the rectifier and inverter.

According to Tanzer, the latter mode would normally produce the smoothest current but also leads to the highest power losses, while the former could lead to power outages at switchover. The Trinergy UPS’s third mode smooths output current and offers power conditioning for a sinusoidal output waveform even if the incoming voltage is non-linear by passing output current through the inverter. Key to this process is a choke in the power interface that can operate at supply voltage and which Tanzer said “has never been done before”.

Chloride’s Trinergy UPS is built from 200kVA modules, one per rack, each of which produces 200kW, according to Tanzer. Each module can be expanded to a maximum of six cabinets in series for an output of 1.2MW. Users can then buy a maximum of eight parallel rows of cabinets, to take output to the maximum 9.6MW.

“What we also do in the face of variable load is to switch off modules if the load decreases. Restart is automatic and occurs well inside within five milliseconds,” Tanzer said. “The efficiency is driven by our fast control electronics.”

Tanzer said that this helped the unit remain within an efficient power band. Additionally, its modular nature means that datacentre managers can operate an n+1 redundancy regime that requires only a single additional module rather than duplicating the whole UPS.

Prices depend on the installation, and will include a maintenance contract. Tanzer said the first Trinergy installation was due to go ahead soon in Singapore.