Arc flash mitigation initiatives in data centers electrical substations: A case study

Data Centers' continuous operation is crucial to business continuity as these centers are usually hosting company's important systems and services. Companies' and services' owners strive to balance between the required reliability and redundancy level to efficiently manage their businesses. Thus, data center maintenance becomes a vital task for data center managers, to ensure achieving equipment maximum performance and reliability level. These maintenance tasks - which encompass many breakers' switching activities for high voltage and low voltage electrical systems - will expose operators to a high risk of an arc flash incident, where rapid release of electrical energy will occur, due to arcing fault between electrical phases, neutral or ground, resulting in extremely high temperature, a powerful pressure blast, and shrapnel hurling at very high velocity. This paper will discuss the calculated arc flash energy levels in one of the largest data centers in Saudi Arabia, and the implemented mitigation techniques: installation of permanent thermal infrared (IR) sensors in critical electrical joints to properly identify any loose joints at an early stage (30% loading), prior to stressing them during maintenance switching activity; installation of arc flash maintenance switches in Low-Voltage breakers, to minimize the arc fault clearing time, through instantaneously operating the protection devices in those breakers; and remote switching via the site Electrical Power Management System (EPMS), to ensure keeping the operators at a safe working distance away from the arc flash hazards. The outcome of this paper is to share the arc flash levels before and after the implementation of the mitigation techniques, as well as the details of implementing these initiatives.