The Impacts of Voltage Disturbances Due to Faults In the Power Supply System of A Data Center

Abstract

The internal power condition system (IPCS) in data centers is prone to have cable faults that cause voltage dips and swells. The voltage dips and swells impact the power supply units (PSUs) with the servers. The servers connected with the PUSs restart or turn-off when the input voltage comes out of the voltage-tolerance range. This paper analyses the impact of such voltage disturbances on server outages due to a single-phase fault in the IPCS. The voltage-tolerance range of the PSUs is considered according to the guideline of the Information Technology Industry Council (ITIC). The voltage dip propagates to the healthy load sections from the fault location, while voltage swells are also observed due to sudden load reduction. Moreover, the current limitation mode of the inverter in the uninterrupted power supply (UPS) is identified as a cause of voltage dip to almost zero experienced by the PSUs. The reliability of the data center considering the outage probability of the servers are finally quantified to show the impacts of the voltage dips and swells in the IPCS.