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Showing posts from December, 2012

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The "Spark" Behind our EE's interest in their field

You may wonder what ignited the geek so to speak or, put another equally corny way, what event livened the wire in the brains of our electrical design team.  In the case of the youngest member of our team, Robert, who has worked for SAI since his high school days as an intern returning upon graduation from college, the seed was planted even earlier in his education--first grade to be exact when he landed in trouble for putting a staple in an outlet in order to see what would happen. Let's just say sparks flew literally and figuratively.  For Badri, who hails from Nepal though he became a U.S. citizen several years ago, it was the "shock" he received when using the primitive heaters of his childhood to boil water that drew him to learn more about electricity. He originally came to the States to study electrical engineering with plans to return to Nepal to work on the hydroelectric plants being built throughout Nepal and India by Enron in the 1990's. Well, we a

Power Quality and Power Reliability: UPS vs. Standby Power Systems

There is a lot of discussion lately about UPS and standby systems (and, no, we are not talking about methods of package delivery or airline flight status). Given the shaky state of the power grid, climate change induced weather events and a greater demand for electricity both in the U.S. and globally, power quality and power reliability have become major issues for commercial as well as residential customers.  U ninterruptible P ower S upply systems, commonly referred to as UPS systems, can filter incoming power to protect against electrical "noise" such as spikes or transients ( i.e ., a type of pulse caused by factors such as lightning, switching surges, or kick-in of large motors), thereby improving power quality in our increasingly data-driven world. The need for UPS systems is particularly acute for data centers, office server rooms and telecom equipment spaces, or any computer-intensive environment. Typically, UPS systems also have batteries to ride through power o