Control Design: While attending community college, our programmable logic controller (PLC) class took a field trip to a packaging plant. When looking in the controller cabinet, I noticed that the PLC’s power leads originated from a DeWalt 24 V cordless drill battery pack sitting in its charger. If power was lost, the PLC continued to run from the cordless drill battery for long enough to save its data and shut down, as opposed to just power off abruptly and lose critical data.
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UPS's and battery backup power supply systems are interesting to me, particularly seeing as my high school theater had one that never got used because it had an old, broken battery (and maybe internal electronics issues). However, I understand why we have it, and based on this article, I think that the traditional UPS makes sense in a theater setting: while almost any of the show equipment is going to ungracefully shut down immediately on a loss of power (no one is running a battery backup for a 200 amp dimmer rack), the it really sucks (and is bad for equipment) to have a console die and loose a show file. However, in almost all cases this would be a human induced action after power is lost, so supercapacitors seem pointless in this case unless there is an automated system to save when line power is lost. However, I would be interested to see if they have an application in automation control systems, for systems that do need to stop when power is lost. On the other hand, almost any automation's automatic state when power is lost should be to stop, so I am not sure if there is actually an application. However, they could still be useful to gracefully shut down equipment, from amps to lighting fixtures. Finally, I am curious about the potential for supercapacitors in portable electronics on stage--say, some prop that only needs to do a momentary lighting effect, but has limited space for a battery--I wonder if a supercapacitor would work better for that application.
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