Hospital Power Quality
Think about it for a minute. If you were planning a modern hospital, how many electrical sockets would you need around a typical hospital bed? What about an A&E bed? Or a High Dependency Care unit? Do any of those sockets need an uninterruptible power supply? Do any of them need non-standard voltages?
So, you’ve spent a minute looking at the beds where patients recover from or wait for treatments. What about the places where treatment is given? Surgical theaters, anesthesia and recovery rooms, Radiography and Radiology departments, dental surgeries – the list is endless. And on top of that you also have to provide 24/7 environmental systems: heating, ventilation and air-conditioning (HVAC), lighting, entry control, security and site services such as parking management, CCTV, street lighting, catering and that pretty fountain outside the main entrance. Once you’ve figured out all that, how do you actually plug it into the electricity grid without blacking out half the surrounding neighbourhood?
Hospital power quality is not a simple task, many of the high power machines generate harmonics and/ or switching transients leading to possible power quality issues. Not only this, but many life support and critical systems fully depend on reliable power, so ensuring for back up supplies and back ups for the back up supplies is crucial.
With all this taken into account, it seems fairly obvious that hospitals require lots of engineering and planning when it comes to the electrical infrastructure. This includes detailed power system modelling for new sites or expansions as well as specially designed harmonic filters and power factor correction units to ensure high cost machines are not damaged and that the grid code requirements are satisfied.
Check out or full paper for a deeper dive into this topic, including a detailed understanding of the requirements for hospital sites in the UK, Europe and USA. The full paper can be found at this link: Powering a hospital
More details on our power systems studies services can be found here.
As well as more details on harmonic filters here and power factor correction here.
