Introduction

The Francis Crick Institute is a state-of-the-art medical research centre located in the heart of London, opposite Kings Cross St Pancras train station. Named after one of the discoverers of the structure of DNA, the institute has been designed and equipped with everything biomedical research teams need to make discoveries to help treat and in some cases, eradicate disease across the globe.

Research experiments often run 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and use sensitive equipment which can be affected by even the smallest fluctuation in power. A voltage sag, also known as a brownout, can cause experiments to fail and valuable data to be lost.

The institute employed an electrical consultant to investigate a way to resolve this issue which was starting to cause an impact and they recommended installing ABB Active Voltage Conditioners to protect the power supply and as the UK’s only partner for this power product, Sentridge Control were approached to help.

The Challenge Before ABB Active Voltage Conditioners

Lee Downes, Senior Project Manager for the Facilities & Infrastructure Project Team explains, “Our role within the Crick is to give scientific groups the best working environment for their research needs and from the outset ensure things are running as smoothly as possible at all times, day and night. We have stand-by generators and some uninterruptible power supply (UPS) solutions as back up for a complete black-out in power.

The issue we had was scientific equipment was failing when the building experienced momentary dips in power supply from the grid. We started to log both the equipment failures and the electrical supply anomalies and were soon able to determine that problems occurred with a sag incident. It is surprising that even the tiniest voltage sag could cause a problem, but it often did.

The sags from the grid weren’t able to be avoided or mitigated by our power provider and so we knew we would have to resolve this issue in-house.”

Why ABB AVC’s?

Lee continues, “Our electrical consultant carried out comprehensive research into possible solutions and we approached Sentridge Control to start talks on how this solution could help us.”

Phil Tomkinson, Sales Director at Sentridge Control, comments “The ABB PCS100 AVC-40 is the perfect solution for protecting critical applications and equipment. Any sag in voltage of up to 40% will be corrected automatically – no costly downtime, and in the case of the Francis Crick Institute, no loss of valuable data. Following a site visit, we were able to specify how many would be required to protect the supply. We designed the solution to fit within the switch rooms and worked with Lee’s team and the installation team from CEMA to plan the project to ensure minimal downtime.”

The Results

Since the commissioning at the start of 2023, there have been 4 logged events that were successfully corrected with no loss of loads.

“Any downtime of critical equipment is costly,” adds Lee. “A reliable power supply provides a lot of piece of mind to our staff and scientists.”