Air-Conditioning

CIEMAS's HVAC system works by taking either cold water or hot steam pumped from the Chill Water Plant on Towerview Road or the Coal Plant on Research Drive, respectively, and converting the energy from the water at its different temperature states into conditioned air. This mechanically complicated process involves pumping the water into the top floor "penthouse" of CIEMAS where massive EAS and Trane-manufactured air handling units convert the energy of the cold or hot water into appropriately warm air. (Additionally, the units ready the air for circulation—they purify the air and dampen the vibrations of the rapidly moving air to remove the 'howling' noise.)

 

Distribution

Once the air has been brought to a sufficiently warm or cool temperature to properly condition the building, it is sent through a labyrinth of ducts to the various rooms in the building. Unlike in conventional systems, this conditioned air does not simply seep through vents in the ducts into the rooms. CIEMAS's HVAC system includes an mechanized fan that will blow the conditioned air into the room at a different rate depending on the user-setting specified on the thermostat. This automated process uses Siemens technology.

Each thermostat is physically wired to an electronic "cabinet" in one of the various maintenance rooms throughout the building, where the signals are received and processed. Every cabinet can have up to three "trunks," which can each process information for up to 33 different devices, such as how fast the aforementioned fans should spin to circulate the proper amount of air at the given conditioned temperature to fill a room of a given size to a variable setting. Thus, each cabinet can give direction to a maximum of 99 devices wired to it over the network (using LAN). To perform their duties, these Siemens-manufactured Facilities Automation Controls System (FACS) cabinets are capable of handling 32,766 lines of code.

Monitoring

The entire HVAC system can be monitored from various workstations in the building. These stations contain computers with graphic displays of the information being processed in the cabinets, and can be used to alter the computer codes that regulate the outputs to the wired devices. (Note that though the individual cabinets are not IP-Addressable, the workstations are.) When a room is not being conditioned to the proper temperature, a service technician can pinpoint the problem with relative ease at any of the workstations.

Energy Recovery

In addition to to state of the art monitoring systems, CIEMAS is also equiped with high-tech energy recovery devices, making the building very environmentally-friendly. For example, energy from body heat in the auditorium is recovered to heat other rooms in the building. The same goes for most of the other potential heat exhausts in the building, for example from the labratories. Additionally, latent energy stored in condensation is converted into usable energy for the HVAC system. Pictured here is the cabinetry of a heat wheel that does much of the "converting" of excess heat to usable energy. (Note that this cabinetry represents Air Handling Unit #11, as diagrammed in the screen-shot above.)