An urgent requirement for the safe supply of critical care power at Crawley Hospital has been met with an engineered solution and use of a GRP building craned onto an adjacent roof space.
Bender was approached to provide the Group 2 Medical IT Power for four operating theatres in the day-surgery unit at the hospital run by Surrey and Sussex Healthcare NHS Trust. The Crawley Day Surgery Unit is located on the first floor of the hospital’s Red Wing.
Bender UK was commissioned to carry out the work by building services specialists CBG Consultants on behalf of Morgan Sindall which is the main contractor for upgrade work at Crawley Hospital.
The compact modular Medical IT Power was built into an area close to the theatres, using Bender UK’s engineering capability to fit the equipment into limited space, and by separating components that would normally be in a single enclosure.
However, with existing buildings already at capacity, there was little space to accommodate the larger footprint modular uninterruptible battery power (UPS) that was also required. Bender UK enlisted UPS specialists Centiel UK and together they developed a plan to install the modular UPS in a glass reinforced polymer (GRP) building to be craned into position on a specially reinforced flat roof adjacent to the theatres, with cables linking them.
The innovative design created by Bender and Centiel allowed access for equipment and maintenance, maximising the space available and at the same time minimising costs. The custom-built GRP building accommodates two full future-proof modular UPS systems and its own air-conditioning to maintain a stable environment for the equipment.
The project took just eight weeks to complete from the approval of drawings to full commissioning of the Medical IT solution serving the critical care facilities, and the UPS system within the new GRP structure. Craning the GRP onto the reinforced flat roof was achieved in a single day, minimising disruption to the busy hospital site.
The Crawley hospital project was an outstanding collaboration effort harnessing the expertise of specialists in their fields to deliver a bespoke solution for the Trust
Matthew Mears, National Healthcare Consultant at Bender UK explained: “The Trust had an urgent requirement for a new Medical IT power system to bring the day-theatres at Crawley General Hospital back into service but the severe space restrictions at the site meant a conventional system simply could not be accommodated. It required all of Bender UK’s experience and engineering know-how to devise and deliver a solution that met their urgent requirements, and could be accommodated on the site.
“Bender UK’s ability to engineer modular isolated power configuring the equipment to fit into the cramped space available, was a vital factor in achieving the customer’s aims. A standard ‘out of the box’ system simply could not work within the confined location.”
The Medical IT system included Bender’s unique ATICS™ auto-changeover system. ATICS™ technology operates in conjunction with the UPS fail-safe battery back-up system to provide cost-effective and future-proof resilience for critical power supplies. It is the only fully certified Safety Integrity Level (SIL) 2 rapid changeover solution for healthcare applications with patient safety at the very core of its conception and development.
Bender also designed and commissioned two bespoke UPS-backed distribution boards equipped with Residual Current Monitoring technology (RCM), which feed general lighting circuits and other non-medical loads. The incorporation of Bender RCM prevents the need to shut down for periodic inspection and testing, delivering huge operational and financial benefits in terms of reduced downtime and disruption.
The UPS also required an innovative approach by Centiel UK who commissioned Morgan Marine to build a bespoke GRP building. Centiel’s engineers installed and commissioned the UPS equipment once the GRP building was in situ on the roof.
Comprising two ‘future proofed‘ modular 60kVA UPS, each including 3 x 20kVA ‘hot swappable’ modules and multistring batteries sized to support a load of 40kW for 60 minutes in an N+N configuration. The 240 battery blocks weighing almost 3.5 tonnes were configured in 2 x 5T4R (5 Tier 4 Rows) Open Battery Stands.
Unlike traditional centralised parallel multi-module systems, the advanced CumulusPower technology employed by Centiel UK at Crawley combines a unique Intelligent Module (IM) technology, with a fault-tolerant parallel architecture - Distributed Active-Redundant Architecture (DARA) - delivering the highest availability and reliability.
The system was all contained within the GRP building and also included 2 x 200A rated UPS external maintenance bypass switch panels, and 2 x 100kVA delta zig zag transformers to create a permanent neutral reference on the output of each UPS at all times. Each UPS system is designed with spare capacity to add 3 x 20kVA modules in the future, enabling a seamless upgrade to become a 120kVA capacity system or 100kW N+1. Louis McGarry, Sales and Marketing Director at Centiel UK Ltd commented: “The Crawley hospital project was an outstanding collaboration effort harnessing the expertise of specialists in their fields to deliver a bespoke solution for the Trust. Bender and Centiel were quite literally ’thinking outside the box’ to accommodate systems beyond the physical restraints of the existing buildings on site.”