Cummins MC200 digital master control system for Westmead Hospital
Sydney’s Westmead Hospital is a large teaching hospital in the South Hemisphere with an international reputation for medical and scientific research.
Commissioned in 1978 in the western suburbs, the hospital has around 1000 beds. An indication of its size is that there are more than 13,000 operations and 4,000 births at the hospital each year.
Redevelopment of Westmead Hospital began in 2004: Stage 1 is a $130m project involving a mix of new and refurbished facilities for intensive care, women’s health and newborn care, and cancer and renal treatments.
A new emergency power system is also part of the redevelopment, with generator sets and a master controller from Cummins Power Generation specified for standby duties.
The 3 MW system builds on work done several years ago by Cummins at Royal Prince Alfred Hospital in Sydney in conjunction with building contractor Thiess and electrical contractor Star Electrical – the companies now involved in the Westmead Hospital redevelopment.
According to Cummins, the big challenge is working within and around a fully operational hospital. Westmead Hospital has eight substations, so Cummins installed temporary gensets at each substation while it was dismantling and removing the old standby power system and installing the new one.
This reduced the risk of unplanned outages to the hospital’s power supply during the works, and allowed Cummins to start from scratch in establishing a functional plant room with good access to the new generators for service and maintenance activities.
The use of temporary generators also allowed Cummins’ applications engineer and service technicians to fully load test the generators and test and commission the master controller prior to being put into service, further reducing the live facility’s exposure to unplanned power outages.
Cummins was given six weeks to complete the project, a timeframe it successfully met.
The original plan for the Westmead Hospital redevelopment was to add one new genset to the existing two generators.
According to Thiess, when it looked at the cost of upgrading the old gensets and paralleling them with the new one, it decided it would get far greater benefit from installing a complete new standby system.
The fully integrated system utilises three 1005 kWe Cummins 1005 DFLC generator sets powered by Cummins 50-litre KTA50 G3 engines together with Cummins PowerCommand digital paralleling equipment.
A Cummins MC200 digital master control system provides integration of the emergency power system with the hospital’s alarm and monitoring system. It also provides the plant operators with a touchscreen interface to monitor the generators as well as system load and status during operation.
A SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) system monitors the eight substations at the hospital and allows the standby system to power individual substations in the event of an outage. For example, if only one substation loses power, the standby system sends power to that station.
The Westmead Hospital project reinforces Cummins’ ability to provide a total system solution.
It also highlights Cummins’ ability to not only supply quality power generation equipment, but also co-ordinate with builders, electrical contractors and end users to install, test, commission and cutover emergency power systems that meet the customer’s needs with minimum interruption to services.
Westmead Hospital has an international reputation for medical and scientific research.
Fully integrated power system utilises three 1005 kWe Cummins generator sets powered by Cummins 50-litre KTA50 engines.
Cummins MC200 digital master controller provides plant operators with a touchscreen interface to monitor the gensets as well as system load and status.
17-Apr-2007