Page 35 - College Planning & Management, April 2017

The Optimized HVAC Lab
What will students see when they look inside an advanced campus HVAC system?
kilowatt-hours and 5.26 million pounds of CO2 within the first year of its optimization.
Another university we work with could walk students through the same challenge doubled, plus the extra problem of connect- ing to cloud-based optimization software under a strict security regime. The tech-focused university has two plants — one with six chillers and the other with seven — and requires that its control system remain completely isolated from the Internet. Our engi-
neering team had to figure out how to pass data from the plant to off-site management servers without com- promising the plant control system’s network security. The solution was to use data loggers that isolate network traffic on one side from network traffic on the other. The data loggers contain registers that the control
system can write values to, and the university’s servers read that data. Data can be written to the data loggers only from the control system network, and data can be read from the data loggers only from the network on which the servers reside. The off-site servers
At Baylor University in Texas, they’ll see a solution to the prob- lem posed by mixed-equipment systems — a common situation. Baylor’s chiller plant comprises eight chillers of different sizes and ages, which presents a hydraulics challenge: how do you properly distribute the total flow through the chillers when each of them has a different pressure drop? The chilled
water will naturally go through the
chiller with the lowest pressure drop,
and far less flow will go through the
chiller with the highest pressure
drop. Students might think you’d use
the modulating isolation valve on the
chillers to balance the flow, but with
eight chillers you have 256 possible
run combinations, so fixed-valve positions for balancing flow won’t work. The answer was to develop an algorithm that dynami- cally adjusts valve positions so that the system is balanced under any combination of chillers and flow. The plant saved 3.55 million
It’s clear that students need to understand real-world applications and how to commercialize solutions. Part of our mission
is to educate and innovate, and universities are where technology innovation happens.
Discover the
Advantages
of FABRIC
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APRIL 2017 / COLLEGE PLANNING & MANAG3E/1M4/E17NT12:532 P5M