The BioHealth Capital Region (BHCR) consisting of Maryland, Virginia, and Washington, DC is the prominent BioHealth cluster in the Mid-Atlantic. The BHCR encompasses more than 800 life sciences companies, over 70 federal labs and world class academic and research institutions. According to Genetic Engineering News (May 2016), the BHCR is ranked 4th in Top Biopharma Clusters in the country. The BHCR brand represents collaboration among leading stakeholders with a collective goal to make the BHCR a top 3 biohealth cluster by 2023.
Things That Go Bump in the Night: Are your plant backup systems causing lab equipment failures?
Most people have come into the lab to an experiment that didn’t work because a piece of equipment or instrumentation has failed due to a power problem. In some plants damage from a power surge or just a failure to operate from a brown-out or a transient loss can happen often enough to mean serious uncertainty for a schedule. If experiments run days or weeks the probability of a failure and the concomitant risk is increased. Equipment can take time to be repaired and replacing damaged components components can be costly.
Transient failures on the order of a second or two can glitch certain microprocessor-based instrumentation with no sign of the cause. Fingers get pointed at the power system but with no evidence hands go up in frustration… until the next time.
One of our clients called on BME Systems to find out what was causing frequent lab equipment and communication failures between systems.
Coming soon: A case study of plant power, backup power generation and surge suppression related to laboratory systems.
