TECHNICAL ARTICLE

A New Zealand company, PowerShield, has developed what it claims to be one of the world’s first automatic monitoring systems to measure, record and analyze back-up battery systems, avoiding the substantial financial losses which can result if such battery systems fail during major power cuts.The PowerShield technology replaces manual monitoring, which was labor intensive, costly and was often a risky job as staff had to work among banks of batteries and electrical wiring to try to calculate the state of standby batteries.

Manual checks are not a foolproof method of confirming that batteries will function when required in an emergency. Len Thomas, PowerShield’s managing director, says the cost of early battering monitoring was more expensive than the batteries being monitored. Battery monitoring remains a relatively immature industry, and PowerShield says it has an early lead in the global market. Its potential is growing as companies move to protect themselves against compensation claims for canceled or disrupted services during power failures.

When a power failure blacked out large areas of North America’s east coast in 2003 people assumed they would at least have the security of cellphone communication, but more than 20% of the batteries in cellphone network sites failed, he says.

The PowerShield product incorporates a measurement module with optical isolation to transfer data from each battery. The technology provides remote, continuous battery monitoring, comprehensive reporting that identifies voltage variations so remedial repair action can be taken, and an electrically safe environment. It captures data by sampling all batteries in the bank every two seconds, calculating the capacity of each battery and triggering an alarm when a defective battery is detected.

The system also provides information that allows companies to redirect emergency battery power to priority services and close down non-essential areas until emergency generators power up. PowerShield is installed in some prestigious international sites, including 450 Singapore telecom sites, the Hong Kong and Taiwan stock exchanges, and banks in New Zealand, Australia, the U.K. and France.

The company has achieved its international success with just nine staff and it now aims to add greater intelligence to its battery monitors so that the technical data provided can be translated automatically into everyday language that companies can easily understand without requiring expert interpretation. A partnership is also being forged with a Swiss company to develop new technology that will predict battery life during monitoring. This will open up further export opportunities for PowerShield, particularly in the lucrative United States markets.