An overview of uninterruptible power supplies

Abstract

An uninterruptible power supply (UPS) can range from a 9 volt battery all the way to an extremely large and costly battery system. The UPS sits between a power supply such as a wall outlet and a device like a computer to prevent undesired features that can occur within the power source such as outages, sags, surges, and bad harmonics from the supply to avoid a negative impact on the device. There are several types of UPSes as they strictly relate to computers. The standby UPS is a battery backup to fill in the void of power loss, while the ferroresonant stand by couples the battery back up with the power supply by a transformer, where the transformer acts as a buffer from the power supply to the stand by supply. The line interactive UPS uses an inverter converter only, with a power supply the stand by battery is charged up, and with a loss of the primary power supply, the inverter converter switches over to the battery back up with a much quicker switching time that the stand by UPS.