Bus Duct Monitoring in Hyperscale Facilities
In 2020 a major American tech company began looking for a new method of bus duct temperature monitoring for its hyperscale facilities globally, specifically for a continuous monitoring solution for the entire length of high ampacity bus ducts that emerge from UPS rooms. In this case study, we describe one project for a UK facility designed and built to operate as a modern hyperscale facility. One challenge of this facility is that the bus duct infrastructure spans across two levels of the building, crossing nearly thirty separate rooms at a typical height of three meters above floor level.
AP Sensing collaborated with a local partner for the deployment of one fiber optic Distributed Temperature Sensing (DTS) unit with four channels; each channel monitors up to approximately four kilometers. The DTS unit is wall mounted and fitted within an electrical room due to physical space constraints. The fiber optic sensor cable was fitted along the 1600A and 3200A ampacity bus ducts, including at all joint areas and using custom cable clips. Joint temperature monitoring is particularly important for high ampacity bus ducts.
Our DTS solution is configured for Modbus TCP/IP communication and achieved seamless integration with the end client's Operation Center. At this facility, an AP Sensing project engineer configured over 100 alarms and over 100 temperature values, enabling the easy visualization of bus duct temperatures and pinpointing the exact hotspot for further investigation in the case of an alarm.
