Many of the world’s most vital research industries depend on environmental rooms and chambers to house their products. The delicate materials they work with must be stored in highly engineered environments that maintain exacting conditions. But what happens when the power fails, a natural disaster strikes, or equipment malfunctions? How do you protect crucial research and other valuable assets? The answer: mechanical redundancy.
What is Mechanical Redundancy?
For environmental rooms, mechanical redundancy is achieved by creating backup systems that can take over if the primary system encounters an issue. A common approach to mechanical redundancy is called N+1, which adds one extra cooling unit, such as a fan within a unit cooler, to the mechanical system. If a fan fails or requires maintenance, the extra fan can take over. However, the redundant fans are part of the same unit cooler, which can fail or lose connection to the electrical system creating a vulnerability that the “redundant” fan cannot overcome.
At Environmental Specialties, we design our systems with N+N (or 2N) redundancy. With 2N, a complete mirror of the mechanical system (including all cooling units) is created. Each system takes turns operating independently for set durations of time, and should one system fail, the other system is able to maintain all refrigeration function for as long as necessary until the failed system is repaired, for far more robust protection. Though it does add cost to a project, the 2N configuration is well worth the investment when high-value assets are being stored.
The Value of Mechanical Redundancy
The loss of assets during a power outage or mechanical failure can be devastating to a company that stores high-value products, materials, or research. For pharmaceutical manufacturers, biotech labs, battery developers, and others, a mechanical outage could destroy assets worth billions of dollars.
This is why achieving 100-percent redundancy in environmental chambers is essential, whether they are ultra-low temp freezer suites, cold/freezer rooms, dry rooms, environmental clean rooms, archival rooms, or other precision-engineered environments. This is where environmental room designers—like Environmental Specialties—come in. Our job is to engineer and build systems resilient enough to withstand even the most severe emergency.
At Environmental Specialties, we offer customized redundancy to meet your needs and are prepared to engineer the most sophisticated 2N systems whenever needed. Additionally, unlike most large freezers—which only have mechanical redundancy—we can also incorporate a liquid nitrogen (or LN2) back-up into our ultra-low temperature units to protect against the loss of product during power outages.