Industrial design, Structural design, US Military standards, Heat ventilation, Plug & Play, ISO container

An electrical compact sub-station is a turnkey plug & play solution housing LT/HT panels for large scale power plants. The sub-station is a factory fitted and can be lifted and placed on the pile foundation at the site. This allows the construction team to effortlessly connect with the transformer.

The sub-station is a modified steel platform of a 40’ and 20’ High cube ISO shipping container. The total package comes with a factory assembled electrical panels and easy to lift via a standard crane. The optimized container solution ensures cost-effective and safe transportability to site.

Our client’s objective was to develop a sub-station which can be rapidly deployed to connect with transformer and to the grid for a large scale solar power plant. The LT/HT panels, Inverters should be placed factory assembled and more care to be taken to safeguard equipments during transportation to site. Any mis-hap during transportation and lifting could damage the electrical panels inside the sub-station.

We swiftly understood the client’s expectation and formed a team of Product engineer with structural back ground and purchased a scrapped High cube 40’ and 20’ container to check the feasibility of turning it into a sub-station. From the understanding we developed a new base frame platform using standard available Hot-forged MB and MC structural members and made sure the structural frame comply with US MIL standards for shock and acceleration loads during transportation.

We had the platform ready to house the sub-station’s payloads and we started working with heat ventilation and side wall sheeting to fabricate exhaust ducts and fresh air inlets. The container is fitted with multiple fresh air inlets with dust filters, the size each fresh air louver is decided based on heat load calculations and various iterations of CFD simulations. Our calculations and simulation made sure the sub-station can effortlessly work in harsh temperature and humidity regions.

On completion of the design a prototype is fabricated and mock tested for harsh environmental conditions.

The internal volume of sub-station is fully thermal insulated with UL certified materials. Smoke detectors and fire suppression system were fitted with remote monitoring and bio-metric security systems were installed at the human-entry doors which is connected to the SCADA systems.